B) Responses in alphabetical order (internal use only) 

BIOLINK V1.5  

Dear Anton, 

It s good to hear you are working on a survey of software packages.  It will be very helpful to have this information in a single place. 

Regarding your specific questions concerning BioLink, you ve done a very good job finding information from our web site.  I ve  

corrected and added to this information below: 

  > Availability and cost 

Freely available (send email to ento biolink@csiro.au) 

  > Limitations to scalability 

n/a, DBMS is Microsoft SQL Server (tested successfully to 4 million specimens) 

  > Computing platform limitations or specialization 

Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, client software has been sucessfully installed on an Apple Macintosh G3 running PC Soft Windows 

  > Specialization by taxonomic group 

All taxa 

  > Contact information and URL 

Dr. Steve Shattuck 

CSIRO Entomology 

P.O. Box 1700 

Canberra  ACT  2601  

Australia 

Phone:  +61  2  6246 4272  

Fax:    +61  2  6426 4264 

Email: ento biolink@csiro.au 

URL: http://www.ento.csiro.au/biolink/software.html 

  > Data import capabilities and/or limitations 

Import wizard imports from various formats such as tab delimited text files, Excel spreadsheets, Access, and DBF databases 

  > Data export capabilities and/or limitations 

Raw data export via user defined report module.  Query Tool results can be directly exported to delimited text, XML (two formats), 

Excel, Word, Access and RTF. 

  > URL or other source of database model documentation (tables,   > attributes, relationships, and their semantics) 

http://www.ento.csiro.au/biolink/development.html 

We would like to ask you to correct these information as well as completing the following items which we could not see from your 

website. 

  > Estimate of size and distribution of user base 

Approximately 250 active users in 65 countries. 

  > URL or other source of user documentation 

Full documentation (online help as well as 140 page User Guide) supplied with the software 

If you need additional details please let me know. 

Thanks, Steve 

Steve Shattuck 

CSIRO Entomology 

Steve.shattuck@csiro.au 

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