The Web Portal (http://actinops.com) will serve as a repository for all project related files and publications and serve as the public interface for the project. It will communicate our research to the general public, and provide information on the evolution, biology, distribution, and economic value of the lower actinopterygians.

The Web Portal will support user authentication, allowing collaborators full access and free communication about developing aspects of this research, while at the same time limiting access to only published data for non-collaborators. The Web Portal, together with DeepFin (www.deepfin.org) will be used to facilitate collaboration between participants and information sharing.

Both servers have email list-serve functions to facilitate working group discussions; all messages will be archived and accessible. Sharing and archiving morphological data will be achieved by joining our database to existing databases, such as DeepFin, Morphobank (www.morphobank.org), Morphbank (www.morphbank.com), Ontologies, and/or currently under development by CIPRes (www.phylo.org).

The cyber infrastructure developed for this project will allow collaborators to query and display information contained within the databases as well as to search any of the fields contained within the project databases and return records, images and associated files. The Web Portal will also support queries to FishNet 2 (www.fishnet2.net), an online network of natural history collection databases for fishes, to gather related information on available specimen records.