The major new features and improvements added to each release of the Data Portal.

Production Release 3.1.1 (17 May, 2017)

		Data: 70 new sites added for Queensland' s Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation CORVEG vegetation survey and 25 new rangeland sites by TERN's AusPlots
		Data: CORVEG, AusPlots and Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources's Biological Survey of South Australia surveys were updated
		New feature: Ability to download standalone datasets and integrated site data at the survey level from the metadata page
		Improvement: The Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources's Roadside and Biological Survey of South Australia metadata updated and the 'missing species names' error for some sites of the Biological Survey collection fixed
		Improvement: Missing download data for presence-only and plant abundance records in the vegetation population CSV file for the Office of Environment and Heritage's Vegetation Information System data downloads fixed
		Improvement: Reinstated download feature on landing pages when datasets/surveys are redirected by external hyperlinks (e.g., DOIs and persistent URLs)
		Bug fixes: 2

Production Release 3.1.0 (15 March, 2017)

		Data: 1,023 sites added to the vegetation survey and 4 new roadside transects for South Australia by the Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources, 1 site added to Queensland' s CORVEG survey by the Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation, 9 rangelands sites added to TERN's AusPlots
		Improvement: AEKOS Postgres function renamed and edited, and using rollover bar for logging errors.
		Bug fixes: 10

Production Release 3.0.0 (25 Nov, 2016)

		New: New user friendly interface for finding data
		New: Customised downloads. In addition to our existing ‘species by location’ csv flat file download with some ecology attributes, we’ve added another 8 customised csv flat files with user instructions for download. All flat files are usable in R or similar statistical/modelling tool with the unique AEKOS persistent identifier. For each flat file, almost all of the associated ecology attributes will be provided for relevant subsetting offline in your preferred tool. The csv flat file themes are: Sites – data for sites Flora Individuals - data for observations made on individual plants Flora Populations - data for observations made on plant populations Flora Communities - data for observations made on plant communities Landscape - data for observations made on the landscape features surrounding the sites Soils - data for observations made on soil type, structure, chemistry and functional attributes Fauna Individuals - data for observations made on individual animals Fauna Populations - data for observations made on animal populations. For those who prefer to download the data provided in all the csv flat files as a relational database, a H2 database is offered.
		New: Many new technical advances. The ethos of this new portal is "opt in to complexity". Everything is simple until you ask for more power/complexity.The advances are: Using an RDF data repository which is better suited to our "sparsely populated" data model. The old solution was an in-house developed format whereas RDF isn't so it'll be usable and interoperable with publicly available existing tools. Specifically we're using the Apache JENA software to work with RDF. The portal itself is developed in Angular.js v1. This is a benefit for the user because we can develop new features faster as Angular makes developing a "single page webapp" much easier (than our old approach). We've changed the look and feel to be (much) more modern. We're also using the Twitter Bootstrap UI framework so the website will feel like a lot of other pages on the net and this familiarity means AEKOS is easier to learn and use. We're leveraging the "facet" feature of Apache Solr in our search results to allow user to refine their search. Previously users had to input all their search criteria up front. We're using Docker to make deploying the application more reliable and repeatable.
		Data: 11 new sites added for TERN AusPlots and 33 new sites added for Queensland Government Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation's CORVEG and a major release of South Australia's Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources The Biological Survey of South Australia.
		Improvement: The server behind the portal was already running the Spring Framework but we've upgraded from v3 to v4..

Production Release 2.5.3 (12 August, 2016)

		Data: New large tree dataset (2012-2015) with 48 sites from forest monitoring plots in Western Australia, Tasmania and eastern Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland). These data are published by The University of Tasmania and TERN AusPlots.
		Data: Updated TERN AusPlots with 34 new sites giving a total of 384 sites published.
		Data: Updated Queensland government's Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation CORVEG collection with 268 new sites giving a total of 10,129 sites published.
		Bug fixes: 0

Production Release 2.5.2 (05 July, 2016)

		Data: New ant dataset (1996-1997, 2013-2013) from the North Australian Tropical Transect added by CSIRO and TERN Australian Transect Network.
		Improvement: Extraction crawler to add the word 'AEKOS_' in front of all table/entity names in the PostgreSQL/MySQL scripts for download.
		Bug fixes: 0

Production Release 2.5.1 (14 April, 2016)

		Data: Updated long-term ecological research data (1990 - present) from the deserts of south-west Queensland, Australia published by Desert Ecology Lab, The University of Sydney and TERN's Long-term Ecological Research Network with 2015 data for vegetation, weather and reptiles.
		Data: Updated TERN AusPlots with 34 new sites giving a total of 384 sites published.
		Data: Updated Queensland government's Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation CORVEG collection with 112 new sites giving a total of 9,861 sites published.
		Improvement: DOIs for older versions of datasets submitted by SHaRED now redirect to landing page of DOIs for the latest version of the same dataset published in AEKOS.
		Improvement: Indexed the persistent identifier of each dataset to enable Google to return search results for AEKOS
		Improvement: Packaged RIF-CS harvesting code as a crawler (or similar).
		Improvement: RdfToEml creating sysmeta files stopped.
		Bug fixes: 7

Production Release 2.5.0 (04 February, 2016)

		Data: new long-term ecological research data (1990 - present) from the deserts of south-west Queensland, Australia covering 25 sampling units within 13 sites from the collaborative initiative of Desert Ecology Lab, The University of Sydney and TERN's Long-term Ecological Research Network.
		Data: 19 new sites added by TERN AusPlots, a total of 350 sites.
		Improvement: Now supports robot.txt file and site map for Google searches and removed redirection page.
		Bug fixes: 3

Production Release 2.4.9 (11 December, 2015)

		Data: Soil chemistry data and links to metabarcoding files and scientific methods from the Biome of Australia Soil Environment (BASE) project of BioPlatforms Australia were added to 14 TERN Australian Transect Network (TREND) sites.
		Data: 25 new sites added TERN AusPlots (18 sites) and TERN Australian Transect Network (TREND) (7 sites), providing an additional 200 vegetation plots.
		New feature: The system is able to display and process underspecified DateTime values, i.e. values which do not have all components of a full DateTime object.
		Improvement: Removed legacy __export_configuration and __export_configuration_columns tables and associated code.
		Bug fixes: 6

Production Release 2.4.8 (23 July, 2015)

		Data: 90-years of arid vegetation data from Koonamore Vegetation Reserve, South Australia covering 109 sampling sites/plots published by the Koonamore Research Group at The University of Adelaide.
		Improvement: Removed redundant node in Observation Graph for Koonamore data.
		Improvement: Updated RIF-CS and EML licensing to match CC BY 4.0 Int in the portal.
		Improvement: Partition the __export_entity_data and __entity_type_description tables to speed up the extraction crawler and portal download.
		Improvement: Partition Derived tables for Transform and Subgraph to to speed crawling and searching.
		Bug fixes: 2

Production Release 2.4.7 (19 June, 2015)

		Data: new Tasmanian platypus historical and recent survey data covering 277 waterways (2,134 sampling stations) from Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment.
		Data: 12 new sites added to TERN AusPlot data.
		New Feature: a function at data ingestion that allows sorting an array of the type TimeRange, similar to the function sortTextArray for sorting text arrays.
		Improvement: generic image for search results page when an image is unavailable for a site.
		Improvement: AekosDataSource and AekosDataAccessService are unified so that ingestion and crawlers use the same component as portal for database access.
		Improvement: Backend changes - Springified all traditional ӔKOS crawlers (transform, Subgraph and Extraction).
		Bug fixes: 4

Production Release 2.4.6 (26 May, 2015)

Improvement: Download of ӔKOS datasets from DataOne's OneMercury via ӔKOS's landing page.

Production Release 2.4.5 (24 May, 2015)

		Improvement: Creative Commons By Attribution 4.0 International supported in SHaRED andӔKOS.
		Bug fixes: 2

Production Release 2.4.4 (22 May, 2015)

		Improvement: extraction Help text
		Improvement: can view all study site results on a map.
		Improvement: added DSL script to CI build
		Improvement: added git tagging script
		Bug fixes: 3

Production Release 2.4.3 (1 May, 2015)

		More vegetation sites added by TERN's AusPlots (34 sites)
		Created a NeCTAR instance and 'binary archive' building script to zip up DSL files in preparation for cloud ingestion.
		Improved quality assurance for EML production.
		Bug fixes (4)

Production Release 2.4.2 (10 April, 2015)

		New primary data for assessing the condition of roadside vegetation from the South Australian Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources are available.
		Improved the views of transects on the map at the study site level.
		Bug fixes (2)

Production Release 2.4.1 (07 April, 2015)

		Improved the metadata of taxonomic lists in the Scope section by removing duplicates and listing names alphabetically.
		Bug fixes (14)

Production Release 2.4.0 (20 March, 2015)

		A new feature for publishing EML (Ecological Metadata Language) metadata standard in addition to current metadata. This will broaden access to metadata from ӔKOS globally.
		Data in ӔKOS has been mapped to a RDF standard repository (Resource Description Framework). This is the first stage in delivering a system interface for direct querying using SPARQL, a key query language of the semantic web.
		TERN has partnered with DataOne, and Eco-informatics (on behalf of TERN) has now built a Node to join the DataONE network. Data holdings from all facilities across TERN currently using the EML metadata standard, including ӔKOS are discoverable via the DataONE network.
		Improved 'free text' searches on Integrated Site Data metadata (Abstract, Objectives and Methods sections), improved ӔKOS security and removed unused search terms.
		Bug fixes (18)

Production Release 2.3.0 (02 February, 2015)

		More vegetation sites added with new updates from TERN's AusPlots (59 sites) and Australian Transect Network - TREND (4 sites)
		A total of 27 plant and animal researcher datasets published in SHaRED to date.
		New feature enabling hyperlinks within metadata descriptions in the portal to be active in PDFs printed at download.
		Several improvements to the ӔKOS Data Portal in response to user feedback - Map Search 'back button', refining the the number of search results for the Project Title search term, multiple species can be added for a Species Name search, descriptions for the datasets and methods available as PDFs at download and users can click on a site in the Search Results map and the results scroll to the specified site summary in the Search Results page.
		Bug fixes (7)

Production Release 2.2.1 (22 December, 2014)

		Published data for 10 new vegetation sites from the South-Western Australian Transitional Transect (SWATT) of TERN's Australian Transect Network
		Major enhancement enabling study sites of Integrated Site Data to be displayed as polygons or lines in addition to points on maps
		Bug fixes (9)

Production Release 2.2.0 (24 November, 2014)

		More vegetation sites added with a new update from Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts CorVeg dataset (77 sites)
		Better user experience based on user feedback from Eco-informatics Data User Reference Group's second meeting with the order of tabs in Single Result Summary page to (1) Observation Diagram, (2) Methods Diagram and (3) Metadata and extraction email to users now operates as a service
		Bug fixes (2)

Production Release 2.1.3 (30 October, 2014)

		More vegetation sites added with new updates from TERN's AusPlots (74 sites) and Australian Transect Network - TREND (16 sites)
		Better user experience with "What's New" tab on the portal's landing page, search results submitted via SHaRED can be bookmarked, the misleading Data Cart option removed for inaccessible embargoed data in the search results page, only 'one click' to keep Data Cart content, updated Help for extraction, tool tips for search slider, updated disclaimer texts for data extraction and the portal, updated Readme file for Postgres setup produced at data download and the data extraction files listed in the data extraction folder is retained for more than 7 days
		Bug fixes (5)

Production Release 2.1.2 (08 October, 2014)

		Slider for search levels makes choices highly visible
		Updated ABARES Australian Ground Cover Reference Site Database with 43 new sites
		Better user experience with immediate access to the portal's home page (no splash page)
		Bug fixes (3)

Production Release 2.1.1 (29 August, 2014)

		Improvements to Data Extraction content, processes, and display for site species abundance file downloads
		Improved the performance of data downloads to enable extraction for more than 30,000 study locations
		Minor changes to the portal display to improve readability and upgraded NCRIS logos
		Overhauled the RIF-CS metadata generation and delivery including an upgrade to RIF-CS V1.5
		Improvements to the ingestion of integrated site data to improve performance and utility
		Updated AusPlots data to include a further 21 sites across Australia and the Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts CorVeg dataset to include another 54 sites that have been curated since the previous update
		Bug fixes (13) resolved for the Data Portal and ӔKOS repository

Production Release 2.1.0 (04 July, 2014)

		Site, Location and Species Abundance (number, cover) CSV and shapefile downloadable in a "flat file" format (excel-like) via the data cart
		New metadata includes a permanent link to each survey in ӔKOS Data Portal to enable access to individual surveys from a metadata record from, for example, the TERN Data Discovery Portal and the Australian National Data Service’s Research Data Australia
		New vegetation data and detailed descriptions for over 993 surveys/datasets and 67,274 sites published by New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage
		Data cart can be accessed from any page in the portal
		Direct download of datasets from a citable data reference using the SHaRED DOI (DataCite compatible)

Production Release 2.0.3-1 (20 June, 2014)

Bug fixes (1)

Production Release 2.0.3 (20 May, 2014)

		Bug fixes (3)
		Significant speeding up of the ingestion processing

Production Release 2.0.2 (12 May, 2014)

		Bug fixes (3)
		Geoserver spatial server upgrade

Production Release 2.0.1 (06 May, 2014)

		Enabled pasting a value into 'text' picker.
		Bug fix in the functionality that selected all the text in the Simple Search.
		Consolidated the ӔKOS-sub-button and ӔKOS-big-button CSS classes and moved the Advanced Search reset function to its own button.
		Added a call to clear the observable that stores the search based picker search string when pickers are cancelled.
		Fixed Internet Explorer z-index issues.
		Added an override so the 'page selected' page button for the "smartpaginator" has better colour contrast.
		Changed the order that the search logic works so the view isn't shifted to the centre page until after the server responds. If there are no results, the view won't shift. This also fixes the bug where you could see a flash of the old search results when conducting a new search.
		Fixed the alignment of the help icons over their background for Internet Explorer 9.
		Resolved old showModalDialogue and HTML validator warnings in default.jsp

Production Release 2.0.0 (02 May, 2014)

		New vegetation data for Individual Sites from the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program via TERN's AusCover and the Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology and the Arts are available.
		Additional site vegetation data from TERN AusPlotsare also published.
		ÆKOS now contains two types of data - (1) Individual Sites, also known as Plots or Study Locations, to identify and match plot data on a site by site basis from many data sources; and (2) Surveys/Datasets for whole surveys and also static (opaque) data from researchers. You can do significantly more manipulation and filtering with individual sites as there is specific metadata, context and description for each site/plot in addition to the standard metadata that relates to the dataset as a whole.
		Free text search on Surveys/Datasets and Individual Sites.
		Map search and results have been enhanced.
		The ÆKOS Data Porta integrates and supports SHaRED datasets.
		DOI (Digital Object Identifier) provided for SHaRED datasets.
		User interface of the ӔKOS Data Portal has been enhanced.
		Combinations of Survey/Datasets and Individual Site data can be downloaded together.
		High quality metadata for SHaRED datasets are also available through the TERN Data Discovery Portal and the Australian National Data Service's Research Data Australia.

Production Release 1.1.0 (17 January, 2014)

		Generic maps for google api added instead of specific maps api.
		View/Select All Surveys added in Map Browser.
		Ability for a user to switch on satellite imagery in Map Browser.
		Calendar image for the date pickers added.
		Search Summary Results layer highlights on hover.
		Minor enhancements, e.g., Data Cart, font sizes.
		More changes to download help.

Production Release 1.0.9 (18 December, 2013)

		Bug fixes in Structural Assemblage search,Temporal Coverage and empty PDF file issue.
		Modifications to maps.
		Textual changes to user interface resulting from changes in “Download” tab converted “Data Cart” on Results Summary and “My Download” pages.
		Added a site under maintenance page.
		Added memory config for mvn tomcat plugin.

Production Release 1.0.8 (18 November, 2013)

		Improve how hovers appear to ensure consistency across all values.
		Improve map browser display on search page.
		Bug fixes for search.
		Minor textual changes on extraction page.

Production Release 1.0.7 (24 October, 2013)

		Bug fixes (3).
		Database schema authored for extracted data to help understand database format.

Production Release 1.0.6 (23 September, 2013)

		New vegetation data for individual sites from the Australian Transects Network (TREND) are available.
		It may be useful to have a message warning on downloads.
		Search picker changes and bug fixes for collection title, project title, colour matching, observer names.
		Prevent Search Traits with 0 records from being selectable.
		Pickers modified to use Lucene index rather than database tables.
		Add counts to pickers in the portal.
		Remove the Page Select All and De-Select Tabs.
		Remove the Datasets Layers.
		Highlight selected entity variables when hovering.
		Edit the Map Navigation Control.
		Enable user to add the same species multiple times to a Search.

Production Release 1.0.5 (16 August, 2013)

		Search by ‘Species Name’ has been simplified.
		Search by ‘Observer Name’ bug has been fixed.
		Enhanced functionality on the ‘Search Results Summary’ page with ‘Page Select All’ and ‘Deselect All’ buttons for marking sites to be included in the Extract and Download List on the Download Page.
		At My Download List, new enhancements and buttons for finalizing you download list with ‘Select All’, ‘Unselect All’, ‘Delete Selected’ and ‘Delete All’ functions.
		A script for importing the zipped extraction file into MySQL database.
		A PDF describing the Conditions of Use for using the extracted data.
		A PDF describing the fields of each table extracted in the database.
		The zipped file produced from a download now contains four files. Two scripts for importing the extracted data into either a Postgres or MySQL databases which are free to download.
		Error in downloading all Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources data has been fixed.

Production Release 1.0.4 (08 August, 2013)

New Data

The Australian Government ABARES ground fractional cover data now has an additional 214 sites to complete the dataset.

Data Extraction

		The zipped file produced from a download now contains two files (i.e., scripts) for importing the extracted data into a Postgres database. For users not familiar with Postgres, you’ll need to install Postgres on your desk top.
		Ability to download 100 study locations at a time.
		Buttons for ‘Page Select All’ and ‘Deselected All’ on the ‘Search Results Summary’ panel (20 records per page).
		Ability to park all the selected results in a download list and then pick the ones to download individually or up to batches of 100 at a time. There are also buttons to “Deselect All”, “Remove All” and “Remove Selected” results.

Other enhancements:

		Data layers can be switched on and off in Results map and Map Browser.
		The ability to search by a ‘user-defined location’ is available, i.e., using a bounding box or polygon on the Map Browser.
		Removed repetitive options for the same soil texture class in the Search terms.
		Enhanced display in the “Number of Instances” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Ability to adjust the opacity slider in the “Location of Results” map and the Map Browser.
		Enhanced ability to view photos in the “Observation Instance Details” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Ability to now extract data using Internet Explorer 9.
		Downloads are now listed by date of extraction.
		Fixed the occasional mismatch display of values and corresponding the measures for soil colour listed in the “Observation Instance Details” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Fixed the display of orientation and sampling unit type measures for Ravensthorpe Dataset Study Locations in the “Observation Instance Details” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Fixed display of soil texture class for SA Vegetation Survey in the “Observation Instance Details” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Fixed Ravensthorpe Dataset missing attribute values for species life stage and species cover.
		Fixed populations issues in the “Observation Instance Details” panel.
		Fixed display so that all measures for the ABARES survey now appear in the “Observation Instance Details” panel of the Observation Graph page for a single study location record.
		Fixed the HTTP 500 error relating to a stack dump during portal search.
		Stability of the Observation and Methods Diagrams enhanced.
		The order of search terms selected is maintained in the Selected Options panel.
		Performance enhancements to the Observation Diagram.

Production Release 1.0.3 (19 July, 2013)

Bug fixes

		Search page – ability to manually edit the search expression after removing search strings.
		Search Results Summary page – waterbody layer in the ‘Location of Search Results’ map displays, image sizes pop-up adjusted for better display.
		Navigation from Download page back to Search page returns to Results page.

Other enhancements:

		Search page – ‘search term’ replaces ‘search trait’ in response to user feedback.
		Observation Diagram – tool tips for the value of measures listed in the ‘Details of Selected Measure’ panel.

Production Release 1.0.2 (11 July, 2013)

Bug fixes

		Index trait population.
		Graph viewing.
		Spatial index traits.

Other enhancements:

		Improvements to data description display, content and navigation.
		Ability to view site photos from observation graphs.

Production Release 1.0.1 (03 July, 2013)

		Smarter portal appearance and headings.
		Improved Help Centre with Workflow Help, tool tips, FAQs, ‘How to use’ information.
		Improved Feedback Centre.
		“Project” search type is now called “Survey” search.
		Page numbering and extra ‘forward and backwards’ arrows at the top of pages to allow navigation between pages.
		Search results summary includes a map of locations.
		New + button for adding selected search results to the download list.
		New icons in search results highlighting the licence type and the different themes of data available for a search result.
		Improved Map Browser with bounding box for spatial searching and selected spatial layers.
		Digital object identifier (DOI) available under metadata.
		Improved Observation and Methods Diagrams.
		Data download facility.