The NCMNS API Platform was a multi-functional data publishing platform. The overarching goal of the platform was to provide a blueprint for the construction of RESTful APIs to support scientific research, primarily in the fields of biodiversity informatics, biodiversity, geology, and paleontology.
The 100 Counties Project of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences allowed the public to explore how the Museum engages all 100 counties across North Carolina. Statistics were visualized through an interactive map and animated charts with summaries of each category. The data was updated annually and served through a custom RESTful API.
The State of Mammals website is a small single-page website to provide information about a proposed big data project in Mammalogy and Wildlife Biology.
A podcast hosted by Dr. Eric Dorfman, former Director and CEO of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Dr. Dan Dombrowski, the Museum’s Chief Veterinarian. Along with their featured guests, the hosts identify and explore our innate connections to nature through science, art, and living to promote the importance of preserving and protecting our wildlife and wild places to maintain these connections for better health and happiness. The Biophilia Podcast is a production of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
In 2022, the Biophilia Podcast became the Love Nature Podcast with new branding and design. The Love Nature website now occupies the virtual space formerly held by its predecessor.
The NCSM 3D model gallery enabled viewers to interact with three-dimensional reconstructions of specimens from the three paleontology collections at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The viewer used the 3D JavaScript library, three.js, with data pulled from the Museum’s primary RESTful API.
The Online Collections web application, project name Aves, is a search and data-sharing platform for biological, geological, and paleontological collections. The application was built using the Laravel and Vue.js frameworks. Bootstrap takes care of the responsive behavior, vivus.js for SVG animations, and jQuery Datatables for the display and interactivity of search results. Several collections included a web map for georeferenced specimens using Leaflet and custom GeoJSON API endpoints. The system even includes a simple collections management tool with features that include storage and photo management.
The Online Collections portal belonged to the internal collections interconnected network, a set of web applications that communicated with one another through custom APIs. Here, media in the form of 3-D models, images, and scans of primary sources (e.g., ledgers, labels, and collection cards) associated with specimens were provided by the Collections Asset Manager (CAMS). Spatial datasets, controlled vocabularies, collections metrics are provided dynamically by a Data Publishing Platform.
A ‘proof of concept’ collection of data visualizations using d3.js. The data is derived from taxonomic information directly from the collections databases at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The result is an interactive radial tree that provides a different way of thinking about taxonomy.
Ecosystem Planning & Restoration is an environmental firm that provides services to support a sustainable environment with a standard, small company, information-driven website.
CitSciScribe was a digital transcription project of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The application provided citizen scientists the opportunity to digitize hand-written collection cards and ledgers associated with orphaned collections acquired by the Museum.
