Facet Determination 

The Facet Determination project was conceived by Naturalis with technical support of Trezorix and is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Goal of the project is to develop generic tools and workflows that enable domain experts that have little to no computer knowledge (such as biologists) to create user-friendly determination systems with relative ease. In the project several test sets are being developed, that target different user groups, such as amateur natural scientists and government officials in charge of upholding international trade regulations in endangered species.

The determination systems that can be created with the tools that were developed in the project, are so-called multi-access systems. The benefit of such systems is that it is not necessary to determine a species by following a fixed path, as is the case in "old-fashioned" systems: you can select the different properties of the object you want to determine in any random order, until you get to the result.

Another benefit of the facet determination method is that experts don't have to design or redesign complex decision trees. They only have to put their determination data in a simple table (spreadsheet), that's all. In the project a tool was developed that can be used to determine if such a determination table provides a sound "determination key", meaning that every determination object in the table has a unique combination of features. 

The information layer that forms the basis for the online presentation of the determination sets is created and maintained with the RNA Toolset. Tables can easily be imported and every table can have its own set of properties.

The "multi access search" uses the functionality of facet search in the RNA Toolset. This enables users to identify their species (e.g. longicorns) or objects (e.g. army uniforms) from different approaching points in a fast and efficient way.