ORAL - Ó Tuama

Since its inception in 2001, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has worked towards its goal of making the world's biodiversity data freely available and universally accessible to all. It achieves this by establishing and promoting an international network of participant nodes, maintaining a central indexing service for data served by those nodes, and building a data portal and various web services as access points to the virtual aggregated data store. Ease of access and interoperability of distributed databases are a fundamental requirement for data sharing and, to this end, GBIF promotes the development of community endorsed standards by working closely with Biodiversity Information Standards/TDWG. Throughout its first five-year development phase, GBIF has concentrated on primary species-occurrence data, that is, the specimens housed in museum and other collections around the world, as well as observational records, and through partnership with marine data providers and aggregators, in particular, OBIS, a substantial portion of the 120,000,000+ records now served by the GBIF data portal are marine. GBIF is now in its second phase of development where the emphasis is on enriching the data portal and the variety of web services it offers, and making it easier for users to find and use data. Tools for visualisation/mapping, quality control, and downloading data in a variety of formats for further modelling/analysis are available, or under development. In addition, the integration of new data types into the portal, e.g., geospatial and environmental data, species checklists and images is underway. This presentation provides an overview of the new GBIF data portal, highlighting its contribution to extending the range of information products for marine biodiversity data and thereby becoming an essential resource for all users of such data, whether the general public, policy makers or scientists.

Click on image below for presentation...