not-so-brief list of highlights, meant to whet your appetite.

taxonomic information

When you first start Bauble, and connect to a database, Bauble will initialize the database not only with all tables it needs to run, but it will also populate the taxon tables for ranks family and genus, using the data from the “RBG Kew’s Family and Genera list from Vascular Plant Families and Genera compiled by R. K. Brummitt and published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1992”. In 2015 we have reviewed the data regarding the Orchidaceae, using “Tropicos, botanical information system at the Missouri Botanical Garden - www.tropicos.org” as a source.

importing data

Bauble will let you import any data you put in an intermediate json format. What you import will complete what you already have in the database. If you need help, you can ask some Bauble professional to help you transform your data into Bauble’s intermediate json format.

synonyms

Bauble will allow you define synonyms for species, genera, families. Also this information can be represented in its intermediate json format and be imported in an existing Bauble database.

scientific responsible

Bauble implements the concept of “accession”, intermediate between physical plant (or a group thereof) and abstract taxon. Each accession can associate the same plants to different taxa, if two taxonomists do not agree on the identification: each taxonomist can have their say and do not need overwrite each other’s work. All verifications can be found back in the database, with timestamp and signature.

helps off-line identification

Bauble allows you associate pictures to physical plants, this can help recognize the plant in case a sticker is lost, or help taxonomic identification if a taxonomist is not available at all times.

exports and reports

Bauble will let you export a report in whatever textual format you need. It uses a powerful templating engine named “mako”, which will allow you export the data in a selection to whatever format you need. Once installed, a couple of examples are available in the mako subdirectory.

annotate your info

You can associate notes to plants, accessions, species, …. Notes can be categorized and used in searches or reports.

garden or herbarium

Management of plant locations.

database history

All changes in the database is stored in the database, as history log. All changes are “signed” and time-stamped. Bauble makes it easy to retrieve the list of all changes in the last working day or week, or in any specific period in the past.

database agnostic

Bauble is not a database management system, so it does not reinvent the wheel. It works storing its data in a SQL database, and it will connect to any database management system which accepts a SQLAlchemy connector. This means any reasonably modern database system and includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle. It can also work with sqlite, which, for single user purposes is quite sufficient and efficient. If you connect Bauble to a real database system, you can consider making the database part of a LAMP system (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php) and include your live data on your institution web site.

language agnostic

The program was born in English and all its technical and user documentation is still only in that language, but the program itself has been translated and can be used in various other languages, including Spanish (86%), Portuguese (100%), French (42%), to name some Southern American languages, as well as Swedish (100%) and Czech (100%).

platform agnostic

Installing Bauble on Windows is an easy and linear process, it will not take longer than 10 minutes. Bauble was born on Linux and installing it on ubuntu, fedora or debian is also rather simple. It has been recently successfully tested on MacOSX 10.9.

easily updated

The installation process will produce an updatable installation, where updating it will take less than one minute. Depending on the amount of feedback we receive, we will produce updates every few days or once in a while.

unit tested

Bauble is continuously and extensively unit tested, something that makes regression of functionality close to impossible. Every update is automatically quality checked, on the Travis Continuous Integration service. Integration of TravisCI with the github platform will make it difficult for us to release anything which has a single failing unit test.

Most changes and additions we make, come with some extra unit test, which defines the behaviour and will make any undesired change easily visible.

customizable/extensible

Bauble is extensible through plugins and can be customized to suit the needs of the institution.