903048B 7yrbuspln - U.P. Forest Department

Building ZIMS: The next generation of ISIS software
Preserving genetic diversity and maintaining demographic stability in wildlife populations requires
careful information-intensive management of the combined populations of animals held in zoos,
aquariums and related organizations worldwide. The high-quality, timely, comprehensive ISIS
Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) will meet many of these communities’ needs,
and meet or exceed national and international regulatory requirements.
ZIMS will maintain information on animals in zoos, conservation-breeding centers and some
animals in wild populations. The ZIMS application will better address the needs of aquariums,
where sophisticated, data-intense environmental information management is necessary to manage
large groups of hard-to-distinguish individuals.
The ZIMS Phase I will be a powerfully-architected animal inventory and veterinary system, building on
and replacing the current ISIS software systems. ISIS members’ data on the ISIS system (and in ISIS
software: ARKS, MedARKS, SPARKS, EGGS, etc.) will be loaded into ZIMS. Members will be able to
retrieve the information in ZIMS both graphically and numerically with easy-to-use query tools. ZIMS
will be available through the World Wide Web.
In addition, ZIMS will help our community protect its animals from disease by tracking both
well-known, and new and emerging animal diseases around the world. This is an important new
aspect of ZIMS – there is currently no comprehensive system meeting these needs.
Once the first phase of ZIMS has been completed and deployed, we will begin to explore other areas
that have been identified by our members, such as nutrition and behavior. We will continue to reach
out to our members for their advice and guidance on future phases of the ZIMS application.
As ISIS technology improves, the provenance, history and pedigree of individual specimens will
become more accurately documented. The genetic, demographic and disease status of more than
10,000 animal populations will be monitored and available to ISIS members in multiple languages.
The ZIMS Project is both technologically modern and geographically ambitious. ZIMS is the most
globally distributed Microsoft .NET project currently known to be under development in the world.
While there are projects with much larger budgets, the information technology industry is not aware
of any other undertakings with the global reach of our ZIMS Project.
Almost 500 individuals from 200 organizations have contributed to this powerful idea of ZIMS.
Building on the previous 30 years, a clear and powerful vision of the future is in our community’s
hands, and we are committed to working with our community to reach it.
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