DiversityNaviKey, a Progressive Web Application for interactive diagnosis and identification

Abstract

DiversityNaviKey is designed as a diagnostic tool in the field of biology and related sciences to identify organisms as well as to interactively select other entities and objects related to research based on a set of predefined properties. It allows queries on structured sources of descriptive data (trait data) to diagnose groups of objects based on combinations of optionally modified descriptor-states or values that are selected consecutively during the diagnostic process. The Web App is implemented as a single-page application and contains the entire presentation logic to dynamically change a pre-generated HTML page in the browser. The content data is accessed via a web service as JSON packages. DiversityNaviKey is a progressive web application that uses caching mechanisms of browsers, such as Service Worker and IndexedDB. Thus, the main tasks are also available in offline mode. The current set up uses the SNSB technical infrastructure and data pipelines with PostgreSQL Cache Database and the data management tool DiversityDescriptions as backend. The exemplary data sources are from various domains, two of them are large datasets from the long-term projects DEEMY and LIAS.