Overview

What exactly is Indicia?

Put simply, Indicia’s aim is to reduce the cost of and increase the quality of websites developed for biological recording.

It achieves this by providing a comprehensive set of highly configurable components, so Indicia can be used to build diverse and unique recording sites. Indicia is not a fixed, off the shelf system, instead it provides an infrastructure and tools for rapidly developing online recording websites that fit your exact needs. Indicia provides a set of services, tools and examples that can be added to almost any website to provide rich online recording functionality.

Because Indicia allows complete flexibility in the data entry forms that can be created, it is suitable for anything from public participation surveys targeted at school children right through to structured long-term monitoring projects performed by professional surveyors.

Conceived as part of the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) and managed by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Indicia is free and open source software serving the biological recording community within the UK and Europe.

Key Features

  • Completely flexible - build any wildlife recording form to suit your survey’s needs.

  • Build forms that are simple, fast and intuitive to use, including:

    • Photo upload.

    • Pick grid references from a Google, Bing or any other map layer so say goodbye to incorrectly transcribed grid references.

    • Rapid entry of lists of species at a site.

  • Tools provided for expert verification of data including integration with the NBN Record Cleaner rules (no need to download data into Record Cleaner) and bulk verification facilities for rapid processing of records.

  • Simple and powerful access to data:

    • Built in components for viewing tables, charts and maps of data.

    • Easily download data as spreadsheets or NBN Exchange format.

    • Access data via spatial web services direct from a GIS application or Google Earth.

  • Support for multi-lingual websites - build forms in any language or even forms which support multiple languages depending on user preferences.

  • Can be integrated into most existing websites or build a complete site using Indicia along with the power of Drupal.

  • All this whilst free and open source - every development of Indicia is made available to the biological recording community to benefit all.