The Entangled Bank Project
Science that spans wide geographical areas or attempts to integrate across and study feedbacks between the multiple levels of biological organization from individual organisms to ecosystems is vital to developing the kind of understanding of the natural world necessary to deal with the pressures it faces in the 21st Century.
Such synthetic studies that re-purpose existing information are particularly problematic in ecology as;
- data is inherently heterogenous and widely distributed among organisations;
- archives are few, and where exist have limited structure and metadata;
- data and metadata are often poorly exposed;
- analytical tools are isolated by data format and discipline.
The Entangled Bank Project developed two systems that remove friction from the data cycle, enhancing ecological data mobilisation.
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The Entangled Bank project was a joint undertaking by the NERC Centre for Population Biology, Biology Division, Imperial College London, and the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group, Microsoft Research, Cambridge. The Entangled Bank Integrated Database was developed at Imperial College, while Entangled Bank Discovery by Microsoft.
The team at Imperial were Prof. Tim Coulson, Prof. Georgina Mace FRS, Prof. Andy Purvis, Dr. David Orme, and Dr. David Kidd (Developer). The Microsoft team included Rich Williams, Andy Roberts (Developer) and Drew Purvis.
Funding by the Natural Environment Research Council, Imperial College and Microsoft.