A knowledge ecosystem perspective on development of web-based technologies in support of sustainable forestry

This paper describes Internet-based systems developed for a Canadian Government Forest Pathology Herbarium to make more than 60 years of forest disease and fungal biodiversity data available to researchers, forest managers, and the general public, while streamlining future data entry and ongoing curation of this working collection. The systems have significantly improved the efficiency of herbarium specimen and database management, while still accommodating a historical legacy of data accrued using various schema before system development commenced. They address many issues relating to service delivery, service transformation, and operational deployment of web-based decision aids, culminating in two websites for searching host-fungus and herbarium collection databases, and a stand-alone Herbarium Collection Management System, a program used to manage the curation of the collection. These systems are flexible enough to comply with stringent, yet continually updated government standards and policies, thus representing a highly complex dynamic web system deployment in an institutional setting. Evolution of development of the systems is discussed from the perspective of knowledge ecosystems, defined as "the complex and many-faceted system of people, institutions, organizations, technologies and processes by which knowledge is created, interpreted, distributed, absorbed, and utilized". (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.