Mandala 8: a database system that can start out small and end up big

Mandala™ is a database system for tracking detailed information about specimens, nomenclatural history of taxonomic names, scientific literature, and illustrations. Written using the cross-platform (Macintosh and Windows operating systems) database engine, Filemaker® Pro, Mandala has been optimized for specimen-based systematics studies of a target group of organisms; for tracking samples in bioinventories, which are collected in bulk, sorted, labeled, and shipped as loans to specialists for identification; and it incorporates features for conducting a biodiversity blitz. Mandala consists of 3 files (TAXA, SPECIMEN, NAVIGATION) with 27 interrelated tables. Development on Mandala was begun in 1995 with support from the National Science Foundation and Schlinger Foundation. Mandala 8 was recently released and it is compatible with FileMaker 8 and above. Among the changes in this upgrade was the introduction of detailed tracking of the progress of molecular studies for specimens, following extractions, PCR products, and sequences all the way to links to GenBank. Mandala is most suited for use by small- to medium-sized work groups. Clients using FileMaker can operate Mandala from their desktops or authorized clients can remotely access Mandala from a server hosting the files with FileMaker Server 8 or above. Project data of DarwinCore-compatible fields may be exported from the production database to a stand-alone file optimized for use in PHP-based web queries (we use FX.php, FMStudio®, FileMaker Server, and Adobe® Dreamweaver®). Interactive mapping is provided in collaboration with DiscoverLife.org. http://www.inhs.illinois.edu/research/mandala/ Acknowledgements: Development on Mandala has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation's program on Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) Grants DEB 95-21925, 99-77958, and 07-31528; the NSF Biodiversity Surveys & Inventories, DEB-0425790 "Terrestrial Arthropod Survey - Fiji;" and the NSF Diptera Tree of Life project, EF-03-34948.; as well as the Schlinger Foundation, the University of Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station Hatch Project (ILLU 875-380), and the Illinois Natural History Survey. A special thanks is due to John Pickering and DiscoverLife.org for encouragement and mapping integration between the online PHP databases and DiscoverLife.;