About
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Fossils today are increasingly being digitized and documented by multi-modal data obtained from
visual data (i.e., images and tomography), as well as text and recorded text, locations,
geological
time, and other chemical and physical measurements. Popular online websites such as PBDB
(https://paleobiodb.org) and GBDB (http://geobiodiversity.com/) offer visual explorations of
specimens' localities, but they have limited multi-modal data visualization abilities and face
challenges related to visual obscuration and insufficient interaction/exploration. Here, we
present
fossil-explorer.com, a continuously developing open-source online tool for assisting
paleontologists
with interactively exploring fossil collections. The tool is designed to address the issues of
visual clutter, limited data types, and insufficient interactions. It is intuitive and endorsed
by
paleontologists. We have also quantitatively evaluated the tool by measuring the interaction
scaling
performance. The results show that it provides sublinear interaction performance and thus is
able to
deal efficiently with millions-level data. The current fossil-explorer.com demonstrates the
Ordovician to Silurian graptolite fossil multimedia dataset, which is significant in global
stratigraphy and shale gas exploration. The extended version also facilitates the use of
Deepbone
(http://deepbone.org), world's most comprehensive database of vertebrate paleontology database.
We
developed the code for fossil-explorer.com to be open access and will continue to improve
it.
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Please contact me (zniu@tju.edu.cn) if you have comments, suggestions, submissions, or are
interested
in collaborating on research in this area.
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Credit
PI: Anonymous
Software: Anonymous