Designing an Information System for J&K Flora

Peerzada Mohammad Iqbal

M. Phil Scholar in Department of Library & Information Science, Msc – IT Student
The University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K

Abstract:
This paper discusses Floral Potential of Jammu & Kashmir (FPOK), a project to
digitize the indigenous knowledge of flora of J&K, developed at DLISc in collaboration
with DSIR, which provide detailed information about herbs and shrubs. The project
portrays botanical, chemical information and indigenous knowledge about the flora of
J&K while as each record provides links and active buttons for retrieving images,
searching scholarly publications. This paper discusses the whole project, its technical
and Plant database.

Key Words: Flora, Digital Herbarium, Digital Library of Plants.

Introduction:
Man’s dependence on plants is inevitable. More than 50 million species of plants
and animals including invertebrates and micro-organisms occur on earth and hardly 2
million have been described so far (Kant & Sharma, 2000). India happens to be a mega
diversity nation harboring a rich repository of floral wealth. About 167 economic plants
have centre of origin / diversity located in India along with 320 species of wild relative
and races our state is one of India’s biodiversity hot-spots nurturing a huge floral treasure
majority of which has high economic potential.
However during the recent decade there has been immense loss of biodiversity.
About 70% of identified medicinal plants of India Himalayas are expired to destructive
harvesting (Dhar et.al 2000). In Kashmir Himalaya too about 10% of higher flora is
under threat (Dar & Naqshi 2001). The need of the hour is to ensure that the existing
plants (germplasm) for which their knowledge is essential is to be preserved and well
disseminated.
The existing bookish knowledge about plants, though highly valuable is highly
scattered and not easily accessible to the students, General public, entrepreneurs etc. On
the other hand, the Information Technology has emerged out with a promise to develop
digital initiative for flora so as to bridge the gap between knowledge of plants and their
conservation. It is an exciting period of transition for the botanical community as they
move from the use of mainly print-based research tools to the creation and application of
digital solutions for archiving, management and sharing of information. Throughout
history, botanists have created and summarized the information derived from collected
plants and observations of plant communities to produce an account of the plants growing
in a specific geographic area. These accounts, known as 'Floras' are supported by
catalogued collections of dried plant specimens held in herbaria. Researchers have used
these Floras, including printed taxonomic keys to identify plants included in their
botanical research. In more recent times, these tools have increasingly been digitized,
firstly for local use then moved onto distributed networks and the Internet. Data
associated with herbaria are currently being digitized and uploaded into web-enabled
databanks. The benefits of digitizing floral collection and making it available via the
internet are many; most obviously, it provides worldwide access to plant images and
concomitant data.

Problem:
Floral databases remain essential, fundamental research tools for conservation
planners and other users of botanical information. Indeed, access to basic floral
information is critical for managing the biological resources of any region only if the
database is digitized first. In J&K massive strides are made to develop databases of J&K
flora, still a digital database remains elusive. The collected data previously was accessible
only via specimen labels and a local paper catalogue called “herbarium” which is
restricted to its parent institute, organizations etc. Digitizing the data and make accessible
it via internet with rich searching capabilities will greatly facilitate and enhance studies of
floristic data on grant. Filtering name searches via the library system, will assure retrieval
of desired results, even if an investigator searches with antiquated nomenclature, or
obscure to vernacular names. Another anticipated benefit is that electronic access will
reduce unnecessary handling, thus contributing to long term preservation as a virtual
herbarium.
Objectives:
The primary purpose of this project is to provide an easily accessible, web-based
electronic facility on the plant diversity of Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh, through survey.
The main objectives of the project are to:
I) Create a digital database of plants with images that are of high enough
quality to serve for scientific study and identification where possible.
II) Create a digital Library of Plants with enough searching capabilities.

Methodology
One of the goals of the project is to “Create a digital database of plants with
images ……”. The digital imaging was possible with Sony 6.0 mega pixel camera with
large storage capacity able to capture 10,000 high quality images. Microsoft PhotoDraw
is used for image manipulation. The photo was captured at close setups. This allows for
the creation of high resolution images, showing fine details. For the description of each
plant, we present images of the whole plant and its flowering body. The original
photographs results in the creation of 10,000 X 10,000 dpi, JPEJ high quality image,
which when resized resulted into 3.5’ X 4.5’. the detailed JPEG image are archived along
with description of plant, indigenous knowledge and other related external hyper links of
online journal, with certain more advanced features added viz., six powerful search
engines in a well formatted application i.e., Word/ HTML/ PDF giving a good overall
impression of the entire document.
Completed documents are filed on a computer for web preservation.
Simultaneously Open source Digital library software’s were tested viz. Greenstone digital
library software. The software is used to associate the images with their concomitant data
from the documents. The custom made metadata schema used includes fewer tags like
scientific name, common name, vernacular name, family and full text search.

Work flow
Digitization of the data is a team effort, the main goal of the team was to “Bring
together the indigenous knowledge of flora and capture live images”. To facilitate this,
the team visited various place according to season, in early spring, visited various places
of Kashmir and Jammu, and in summers visited Ladakh and other adjoining areas. The
team expected to have a broad database, which contains fields as sufficient to describe the
whole properties of a plant. The fields or Meta tags were chosen to meet a scheme, which
will enable the future collections to compensate with the current work. The team used
custom made Meta tags to describe each species as:

S/No Meta tag Description

The Latin or "scientific" name of a plant, usually
1. Botanical Name: composed of two words - the genus and the species
(Masthoff, 2008).
The name applied to a plant in common usage, most
2. Common Name:
probably in English language (Swartz, 1971).
The Local or Vernacular name is the native name or
3. Local Name: language as spoken or written by the inhabitants of
that country or locality (Chippindale, 2008).
A broad grouping of life forms believed to have a
distant common ancestry, and sharing many general
traits. Families are further subdivided into genera,
4. Family:
and genera into species. The botanical name of a
family ends in "-aceae," a suffix which means
"family” (Dittmann, 2008). .
A list of characters which gives the attributes or
features of a specific plant, it includes attributes
5. Botanical Description:
like; colour, shape, height, pattern etc (GardenWeb,
2007).
The natural arrangements of plants in particular
Geographical
6. regions of geography (Dienet Online Dictionary, a,
Distribution:
2008).
Plants pertaining to a particular place, or to a
definite region or portion of space; restricted to one
7. Local Distribution:
place or region (Dienet Online Dictionary, b,
2008).
It is the time period when a plant produces the male
8. Flowering Period: and female reproductive structures (Informix,
2008).
9. Part Used: Portion of the plant which has some potentiality.
 10. Chemical Constituents: Any substance having a defined molecular
composition (BSCS, 2000). Which is present in it
and can be characterized by its unique chemical
identity (Steptoe & Johnson, 2008).
11. General use: The general use indicate, usefulness in pharmacy
and other clinical aspects.
12. Local use: The local use indicate, usefulness by the local in
ethnomedicine and other local herb remedy or use.
13. Sources: A Reference to a resource from which the present
resource is derived. The present resource may be
derived from the Source resource in whole or in
part. Recommended best practice is to identify the
referenced resource by means of a string or number
conforming to a formal identification system
(Drakos, 2004).
14. Additional References: An indication of where to find specific information,
for example the references cited in scholarly work,
or reference assistance from Online Journals
Amberton University (2006).
15. Search Engines: Search engines are a coordinated set of programs
which searches an index and returns matches to a
specified keyword (Stuart, 2004).
16. Additional links: On the Web, a connection that, when selected (or
clicked on), will take users to another Web page. A
link can be in the form of text (usually appearing as
underlined blue text) or images which are coded to
act as links. Links are also referred to as
"hyperlinks" (Mysouthwest, 2005).

These Meta tags describe the plant as a whole. Although the meta tags of
Metadata is an issue especially to a Digital Library. There is no consensus about the
elements to be included in the database, though many projects use metadata ranging from
DUBLIN CORE to MARC21, but no such standard metadata has been used to this
project.
 Volunteers next manipulated data using Microsoft Word-2003, PDF creator and
MS-PhotoDraw for image manipulation. The document were created with associated data
and images and kept under high supervision for future preservation and parsing of
documents. The last step was to shape the documents in web format. Project staff also
performed full cataloguing of the source used in WIN/ISIS software.

Findings:
With the changes in storage, Processing and Retrieval of information in the
modern information systems the need for digital storage and retrieval of data is felt as a
need of the hour. The botanical community in partnership with Library and Information
Science specialists can successfully create rich digital harvests. The opportunities offered
by the digital mapping of data from dispersed sources, in diverse formats, will support
global research community to compare and use information in new ways. By the use of
flexible infrastructures it is possible to store full text, images, embedded objects, national
and international journal in an electronic format. Thus it is concluded that a digital
preservation can create an edge over the traditional labeled herbarium, with special
features from Information Technology.
The digital herbarium created is set up as a link out provide to the external
websites as well. In addition, each record in the herbarium contains a direct link to the
appropriate record to other database. The Access main points of the database are:
Common name
Vernacular name
Scientific name
Family

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