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Publishing to BRAHMS online (BOL)

Updated November 2025.

BOL5 was upgraded to BOL8 in November 2025 with WebConnect access from BRAHMS v8.7.3 onwards. To make use of BRAHMS online, you need to include BOL in your licence agreement. Refer to our Licensing, Purchasing and Renewals page.

You can easily create, design and publish websites directly from BRAHMS on a server of your choosing including cloud servers. You can also selectively upload data and images and optionally control access to sensitive data using a login system. BOL is designed with curation and research in mind. Websites can be created for taxonomic groups, museum collections and herbaria, botanic gardens, seed banks and images - or any combination of these.

A range of example website based on BOL5 can be viewed here.

Some key features:

  • Connect to BOL on the BRAHMS project server or install BOL on your own server. You can use a cloud server.
  • The BRAHMS Web Connect module is used to create and edit websites and to upload data to BOL. The latest version has an improved editor with HTML syntax and formatting help with options for providing full control via the website CSS file. Bootstrap is updated to v. 5.3.3.
  • Upload your own selected project BRAHMS Web Links (e.g. iNaturalis, WFO, IPNI, etc.) to your BRAHMS online site.
  • Develop and upload map styles. For example, to differentially colour points in different altitude ranges.
  • Upload all or selected data records from selected tables. Choose which fields to upload – including calculated fields and custom fields and set initial field online visibility. Data fields can be renamed as required. Data uploads can optionally be restricted to tagged or to records that have changed since the last upload.
  • Images can be viewed as physical files or URL links.
  • Data are presented in virtualized data grids with a grid filter row similar to that used in BRAHMS desktop.
  • Searching is fast and is not greatly influenced by the size of the tables. For example, a specimen table with ca. 2 million records can complete a query based on several fields in a few seconds.
  • Visible columns can be selected by users (and a default view set by Admin)
  • Data can be sorted, summarised, mapped and exported (if permitted).
  • BOL has been updated from the previous .NET Framework 4.6.2 that used ASP.NET MVC 5 and Windows services for BRAHMS interactions - to the new application which is written with .NET 8 using server-side Blazor and ASP.NET Core which unifies ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET Web Pages. BOL now uses a secured REST Web Api to replace the previous Windows service for BRAHMS communications.