The Species Analyst based at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center "is a research project developing standards and software tools for access to the world's natural history collection and observation databases. The Species Analyst relies heavily upon the fusion of the ANSI/NISO Z39.50 standard for information retrieval (ISO 23950) and XML. All of the tools used by the Species Analyst transform Z39.50 result sets into an XML format that is convenient to process further, either for viewing or data extraction. This fusion of Z39.50 and XML brings standards based information retrieval to the desktop by extending the capabilities of existing tools that users are familiar with such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Excel and ESRI's ArcView."

Project goals: "The Species Analyst is a research project developing standards, agreements and software tools facilitating the discovery, exchange, use, and analysis of natural history specimen records and observations. Natural history collections are a valuable resource that combined together, provide approximately 3 billion records documenting the global distribution of species over the last 300 years or so. This information is housed in a large number of collections, most of which are using different database management systems, different database schemas, and varying degrees of capture into electronic form. The standards and software developed on the Species Analyst project provides a mechanism for combining most of theses collection databases into a single, coherent, and readily searchable virtual database."

The Species Analyst relies heavily upon the fusion of the ANSI/NISO Z39.50 standard for information retrieval (ISO 23950) and XML. Z39.50 provides an excellent framework for distributed query and retrieval of information both within and across information domains. However, its use is restrictive because of the somewhat obscure nature of it's implementation. All of the tools used by the Species Analyst transform Z39.50 result sets into an XML format that is convenient to process further, either for viewing or data extraction. This fusion of Z39.50 and XML brings standards based information retrieval to the desktop by extending the capabilities of existing tools that users are familiar with such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Excel and ESRI's ArcView.

ITIS XML: "The Species Analyst utilizes the information contained in the ITIS*ca database in a variety of ways. The contents of this folder provide information about the XML output option of ITIS and how to extract data from the ITIS XML output. ITIS*ca is the Canadian implementation of the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS). The goal in this subproject is to define an XML interface to ITIS that may be utilized for programmatic access to the contents of ITIS database implementations. As of June 30, 2000, a new ITIS XML standard was under development.