Education and Outreach

From HAO Wiki

The Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology project provides many opportunities to support educational outreach using the digital atlas of Hymenoptera anatomy and the HAO web services (see Transforming Systematics). Projects for secondary school, undergraduates, field guides for educational museums and USDA-APHIS fit within the scope of this project. As a test case we anticipate organizing a series of Mini Safaris with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Teaching guides will be created using the digital atlas of Hymenoptera anatomy, describing common local specimens, and diagnostic features to look for when identifying Hymenoptera to family. These guides will be viewable on the web using a personal computer or internet-enabled cell phone. Small groups from the undergraduate student body or the public community are taken on collecting trips, videotaping hymenopterans as they visit , foraging, at nests, and bringing specimens to image back to the museum teaching collection. Using a small, self-contained web application written specifically for the Mini Safari, Video is uploaded to YouTube and images to Flickr (using photo upload API). Google Maps will be used for tracking the collecting locations. Diagnostic terms provided by the HO ontology web services are then tagged to these media. As the Mini Safari site gets populated with images/video/tags the public can search the site and retrieve images of local hymenoptera fauna. The process and execution of the Mini Safari will be documented, promoted, and the software made freely available in order to facilitate similar programs in other locations.