[April 2022] The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has been moved its BIE front-end code to ala-bie-hub, which merges ala-bie and bie-plugin into a single code-base.
Other users can still use this repository for updating their own BIE.

bie-plugin is a Grails plugin that provides the core functionality for the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) BIE search and taxon pages application front-end. It should be used by a client Grails application, e.g. ala-bie.

This application/plugin provides a web UI for the associated back-end service bie-index (see bbie-service API) - a full-text search and document retreival for taxon profile pages and general web content (Wordpress pages, data resources, etc.), using JSON data format.

Download Grails version 3.2.11 or later. Fork and then checkout both this repository and ala-bie into the same directory.

To run and be able to make changes to the plugin "in place", edit these files in ala-bie:

• build.gradle
• settings.gradle

and change the following variable inplace = true in both files and save. Run the app with grails run-app and any changes made in bie-plugin will be reflected in the running web application.

Customisations of code and i18n files should be made in the copy of ala-bie (note: and file in the bie-plugin can be copied and pasted into ala-bie and this will override the plugin version). Bug fixes and enhancement for bie-plugin should be provided via a pull request.

The bie-plugin uses ISO-639 language codes, particularly ISO-639-3, drawn from https://www.sil.org/iso639-3/ and the AIATSIS codes, drawn from https://aiatsis.gov.au/

It is possible to blacklist sources of external information that is either incorrect or not relevant. Blacklisting is performed by pattern matching and can be configured by URLs that give a specific blacklist. Blacklists are configured as a map of possible blacklists against the information in a document. For example:

external:
  blacklist: file:https:///data/ala-bie/config/blacklist.json

An example blacklist file can be found here. It contains metadata descibing the intent of the blacklist and a list of entries that will cause the blacklist to trigger.

Each blacklist entry can trigger on some combination of:

• source The URL of the original source of the data.
• name The supplied name of taxon.
• title The title of the article

Currently, the blacklist is only used with the Encyclopedia of Life external source.

It is possible to "pull" common names with special status into their own section and have them displayed in a special way. To do this, use the following configuration settings:

• vernacularName.pull.active Set to true for a pull display (false by default)
• vernacularName.pull.categories A comma-separated list of status values that will cause the names to be pulled (empty by default)
• vernacularName.pull.label The label for the pull section in the names tab (Special Common Names by default)
• vernacularName.pull.labelDetail The detail to put into the label title (empty by default)
• vernacularName.pull.showHeader List these names in the header, just below the preferred common name (false by default)
• vernacularName.pull.showLanguage Show the language of the common name (false by default)

See the releases page for this repository.