The FreshwaterLife team
FreshwaterLife is housed by the Freshwater Biological Association and team members are FBA staff. Not all team members work full-time on FreshwaterLife, but they are all dedicated to the continued success of this collaborative project.
Mike Haft joined the FBA in June 2008 as a bioinformatician and web developer to help manage and design the websites run by the FBA. In this capacity his primary role was developing the user-interaction aspect of FBA websites to make it as easy as possible to for users to gain access to the information they need. He has since taken over responsibility for the overall management of FreshwaterLife and other related projects. Mike completed a PhD from the
Simon Fox joined the FBA in January 2010 as web developer. He was recruited to provide full time web development skills on the FISHnet project, in liason with King's College in London. He graduated from the University of Central Lancashire with an B.Sc (Hons) degree in Software Engineering.
Simon's primary focus has been the development of the FreshwaterLife search tools, these are vital to the facilitating FreshwaterLife's primary aim of providing easy access to freshwater information. He has also become heavily involved in general portlet development since the FreshwaterLife website moved from it's previous infrastructure to using internationally agreed portal standards (JSR168/JSR286).
Paul Johnson joined the FBA in September 2010 as a web developer to work on the JISC FISHlink project with Manchester University. Paul studied software engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Paul's primary focus will be in developing the integration tools between the FISHnet and FISHlink projects, particularly the central semantic querying infrastructure that forms the heart of the project. He also contributes to various other FBA projects (such as the FBA website) and some project support admin.
Louise has been with FreshwaterLife since March 2006. She graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne with a BSc (hons) in Zoology. Louise is responsible for building the online FreshwaterLife community by encouraging participation and information exchange. She also contributes directly to the content by creating and restructuring topics areas and adding items which we hope users find interesting! Louise is currently doing a part-time PhD on the freshwater mussel Margaratifera margaritifera, focusing on the reproductive ecology of the species with the University of Cumbria.
Simon joined the FreshwaterLife team as a volunteer in July 2004 after graduating from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne with a BSc (hons) in Ecological Resource Management. He became a member of staff in May 2005. Simon is responsible for the design of the FreshwaterLife digital key software and for many of the multimedia keys FreshwaterLife has under development, including the electronic version of the FBA fish key. He is one of the two officers working on the Recorders and Schemes Project and also works on aspects of the Image Archive and the Ecological Database.
Mel joined the team in July 2006. She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a BSc (hons) in Aquatic Bioscience. She has recently completed her PhD "Assessing fluctuating asymmetry in stoneflies as a biomonitoring tool", and is now working on the Recorders and Schemes Project with Simon. Mel's main duties include producing materials and courses to support professionals and people with an interest in freshwater organisms and habitats. She also organises promotion events and general awareness raising. Not least, Mel has input into maintaining and improving the quality of FreshwaterLife and FBA products.
Pettman & Associates was formed in 1996 and its mission is to improve global access to information, especially in the aquatic sciences and related subjects. The main focus has been on the development of information architectures and content for globally distributed open information systems. This work has been based on using and developing international standards such as ISO 23950 for information retrieval; the Agricultural Dublin Core; the International Development Markup Language (IDML); Taxonomy Markup Language and XDELTA; electronic multilingual thesaurus construction and taxonomy tools.
Ian has 30 years experience of information services development and management in the aquatic sciences - mainly ecology, fisheries and pollution. He has undertaken reviews and consultancies on the organisation and management of aquatic information services in the UK, mainland Europe, Sub-Sahara Africa, Australasia and for international organisations.
Ian has been involved in FreshwaterLife since the beginning and is one of the project founders. He has a long history in information management having been head librarian at the FBA for many years. He has contributed to advances in information exchange, such as the Z39.50 protocol. He currently works as a consultant (when he's not helping out at the FBA or on FreshwaterLife), and has contracts with international organisations such as the UN FAO, helping them develop their information architecture.
Eric Liao - Web Developer
Based at king's College London Eric Liao is a web-developer working for the FreshwaterLife team as a part of the FISHNet project and also the FISH.Link project.
Consultant Developers working with the FreshwaterLife team
In addition to the regular staff FreshwaterLife also has a number of consultant developers who help out with various projects from time to time.
Kearon McNicol – Consultant Developer
Kearon graduated from Sheffield University with an honours degree in Animal and Plant Biology and went on to do a masters in Environmental Resource Management. He was the first paid staff member of FreshwaterLife and has used his IT knowledge to guide the development of the IT systems which initially made FreshwaterLife possible. He has since moved on from the FBA but continues to advise and contribute to the technical development of FreshwaterLife.
Salman joined the FreshwaterLife team in the autumn of 2006. He was recruited to help FreshwaterLife advance its software infrastructure and take advantage of new technologies to provide a better service to FreshwaterLife users. In particular, Salman was recruited because of his relevant knowledge for the development of the Ecological Database. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a masters in Informatics (majoring in Knowledge Management and Engineering). He moved on from the FBA in January 2009 but still makes active contributions to its development as a consultant.