Behind the scene

About this site

Gerd Bender

In the beginning ...

During Gerd's holidays on White Sands Werner explained his vision of a whale shark database for the Maldives. At this time he stored his data in a single-user Access-Database. After some minutes Gerd asked him: "Why don't you put it on the web? Ok. it is easy to say with the technical background from Germany and as a professional in the computer business. But on a small maldivian Island? So the idea was born. Let's work together. Gerd will do the hosting and designing of the website, Paul will do the programming of the database and the statistics and Werner have to do the fieldsearch underwater. So he get the fresh part!

Technics - for those who are interested in

With Gerd's background there was no doubt about the use of a state of the art content management software (CMS). So that also dive instructors and not only webprofessionals can write and edit the content of the website. Together with MySQL (database) and PHP (programming language) we have a powerful bundle without the expanding costs of other softwaresolutions.

An essential influence for the treatment of whale shark data lies in Pauls obsession in data mining. Shortly, this area searches for non obvious patterns and relations in - normally very - big databases.

Paul Manthey

By using statistical methods like Cluster resp. Discriminance Analysis it is possible to find structures with high likelihood to discover unknown inner relationships between data. The Statistics part of this side will reflect these efforts and present to you the state of the art of our present knowledge about whale sharks.

Persons and passions

Who else is Paul? There is no easy way to approach his partizipation in the whaleshark-id site. In his normal live he develops information systems and gives lessons in database and algorithm theory. In his secret live he cooks everything with four legs (except tables and chairs) and - naturally - fishes (except whale sharks). So his job in the staff is to assure the scientific background in all areas.

The future

First of all, this side will stay as a nonprofit organization in all aspects.