Halpin

The OBIS-SEAMAP project provides a suite of advanced web services for the storage, analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets related to the biogeography of marine mammals, seabirds and sea turtles.  Boat, beach and aerial surveys in addition to telemetry data are submitted by government, academic, industry and non-profit providers through a Plone content management system.  Taxonomies are matched and mined through the Integrated Taxonomic Information Service (ITIS) XML service.  Point observations are fed to the OBIS portal via the DiGIR software and XML-based Darwin schema.  Data are stored with an open-source database / spatial adapter / internet map server stack (PostgreSQL / PostGIS / MapServer).  The rich browser-based mapping interface additionally builds upon Google Maps and AJAX.  Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services provide image (WMS) and XML (WFS) representations of the observations and effort.  OBIS-SEAMAP archives more than 200 datasets representing over 1.1 million observations.  With 3 additional years of NOPP NSF funding secured, we anticipate this archive to continue growing while developing new data types (acoustics, photo-id, 3D dive profiles, distribution model outputs), access controls, OPeNDAP and SOAP web services and client libraries for environmental sampling, and automated population of metadata clearinghouses.