BEEP's bee data standard

The BEEP webapp is designed to allow beekeepers to keep honeybee colonies as healthy as possible and researchers to collect high quality data. To achieve this BEEP compiled highly structured, easy to understand and easy to use data categories. Note that synonyms for data categorisation are: data model, data structure, data taxonomy and ontology. Desk research and an intensive 'mindmapping' exercise resulted in the hierarchical tree structure shown below. 

The hierarchy is important to be able to make the structure easy to use. An example: Bee colonies have specific characteristics and may get into trouble. So 'Colony' is the first branch and a second major branch is 'Disorder'. The subbranches contains required information about these disorders and what the beekeeper or researcher has seen or done. And the other main branches are 'Food' i.e. the food status in the hive, 'Weather' and 'Production' of e.g. honey. See the five main branches here below:

How is it used in practice? In the BEEP webapp, users can select items to include in their inspection checklist which they use to enter data about a colony in a specific hive, apiary and on a specific date. A default list of categories is available and all users can change this to fit their needs at any time. See below an example of one branch with categories. In this case: Colony > Brood > Status. First the simplest version with one data field: is brood present at the time of inspection of not.

And below with all available data categories under Colony > Brood > Status. The user can select which ones to show and which ones to hide.

The data category terms are as short as possible.The data categories are translated in various languages as can be see in the (free to use, open source) BEEP webapp. Terms may be repeated in the tree structure. For example the category 'Frames'. But if they do, they have the same meaning. To facilitate the use of the terms as well as the translation a list with definitions for each term is available in this spreadsheet. See a screenshot of the first rows here below.

For more information please contact Marten, BEEP's data architect