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Abstract
This article describes the experience of project Dryades, coordinated by the University of Trieste, in developing interactive identification keys in the form of applications for mobile devices (iPhone/iPad/iPodtouch). All of our keys were previously generated from a database of morpho-anatomical characters using software FRIDA. The applications for mobile devices, which were tested Europe-wide during the project KeyToNature, have proved to be useful in education, in the promotion of nature-aware tourism and in projects of citizen science. The first-generation apps were stand-alone packages which consisted into a sequence of stand-alone HTML pages, while those of the second generation do incorporate the digital key as a true database into the mobile device. All of the hitherto published applications are basically in the form of illustrated dichotomous keys. Future developments will also include a multi-entry query interface, and will be extended to devices which use the Android system.
Acknowledgements
This research was carried on within two projects: (1) ViBRANT, funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme, Research Infrastructures Group, and (2) Open Discovery Space: a socially powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of eLearning resources, funded by CIP-ICT-PSP-2011–5, Theme 2: Digital Content, Objective 2.4: eLearning Objective 2.4.
