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Case Study : UK OTCF

INTRODUCTION

The UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum (UKOTCF) exists to promote the co-ordinated conservation of the diverse and increasingly threatened plant and animal species and natural habitats of the UK Territories Overseas. It aims to do this by providing assistance in the form of expertise, information and liaison between non-governmental organisations and governments, both in the UK and in the Territories themselves.

CONTRIBUTION

Contributors to this site are Conservation Officers based in the Territories around the world they supply information for two sections of the site:
" Conservation Priorities - This section of the site enables Officers to layout in a pre-defined format what each Territories conservation priorities are.
" Information Exchange - This section of the site enables officers to exchange information with other Territories under three main headings:
o Information Sources
o Funding Sources
o Projects

ADMINISTRATION/EDITORIAL

For the Conservation Priorities section site administrators are in control of the headings under which contributors can enter information. If it is deemed necessary new headings can be added which then are available to all territories to add free-text information.

Within the Information Exchange although a large amount of information that the contributors supply is in a free text format there are a number of drop down lists so that information can be categorised for presentation. These drop down list are populated from tables in the database that are controlled by the site administrators.

PRESENTATION

Access to the presentation of the information is linked via the UKOTCF's main website and is open to the public with no restrictions. The information is aimed at three main targets:
" Educational bodies interested in what conservation work is being carried out.
" Potential Funders who are interested in what projects they could get involved in.
" UKOTCF officers who can find out what is happening in other Territories to benefit from their experience.

The information can be accessed in three different ways:
" Complete page layouts in a conventional web site format
" Hierarchical access to information using the pre-defined drop down lists
" Free-format search using key words across all information

TECHNOLOGIES

The UKOTCF employs the following technologies:
" MS Access - As this site is acting as a prototype and has a very low utilisation it was agreed to use an MS Access MDB to hold the data.
" ASP Client - For this project all three interfaces are written as ASP Browser clients, the primary reason was that all the users of the system were so remote that simplicity of client was paramount.