Progress in, and plans for, the development of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, including the need for standards to enable mapping marine species over the internet
Mark J. Costello 1, Phoebe Zhang 2, Karen Stocks 3, Fred Grassle 2
1 Leigh Marine Laboratory, University of Auckland, PO Box 349, Warkworth, New Zealand. m.costello@auckland.ac.nz
2 Institute of Marine Sciences, Rutgers State University, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8521, USA
3 San Diego Supercomputing Centre, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, L Jolla, CA 92093, USAThe Ocean Biogeographic Information System has tripled the amount of data it serves in the past 12 months to 5 million records of about 30,000 species, and remains one of the largest data providers to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Users can select from different ocean environmental data layers to map species distributions on, and use two alternative range predicting models. It uses the name service of the Catalogue of Life from Species 2000, and is actively working with CoL and the marine science community to have a Catalogue of Marine Life available as the species authority files for OBIS and GBIF. We estimate there are 230,000 marine species described of which most will have few locations. A special effort is required to capture the distribution of these rare species. Links to the source databases provide additional information on the marine species and environment.
OBIS is largely a distributed system. Interoperability was initially achieved using a defined html call and XML return based on a small set of fields (genus, species, latitude, longitude); providers implemented this individually. Now OBIS uses DiGIR based on the OBIS Schema. The OBIS schema is an extension of the Darwin Core Version 2, and is backward-compatible (i.e. OBIS implementations of DiGIR can respond to calls from systems using the Darwin Core). Fields such as citation, start and end latitude/longitude (to allow transect data), and number collected (vs. number preserved) were added to meet OBIS user needs. The standard OBIS portal interface allows querying on genus, species, common name, latitude and longitude. The advance interface allows querying on combinations of these fields plus date, depth, and date source. This will need to expand in the future to allow searches on habitat type and higher classification, and to hold abundance data and polygon spatial data (versus just lines and points). OBIS supports, adopts and will help develop international standards, so as to have a technically efficient and reliable open-access service to the public and scientific communities.