Y. Zhang1, J. Frederick Grassle1, Karen I. Stocks2 & Mark J. Costello3
1 Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA
2 San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, USA
3 Department of Marine Sciences, Leigh Marine Laboratory, University of Auckland, New Zealand
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is an international federation developing access to data, standards, and infrastructure for marine biodiversity information.
In early 2005, OBIS was providing integrated access to 45 data sources worldwide and was contributing close to 6 million data records, of which 4.2 million are resolved to genus level or below, to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). OBIS is rapidly expanding and 10 Regional OBIS Nodes (RON) are establishing national and regional marine biodiversity data centres and/or portals around the world. New data from the RON will further expand the taxonomic and spatial coverage of the OBIS network and localized regional portals will provide services customized to local languages and user demands.
Data and service enrichment calls for standard making/extension to the current OBIS schema (an extension of the Darwin Core V2), and OBIS is working with major standard organizations to derive and implement standards for spatial data exchange, habitat classification, metadata, web services, etc. New services and features (multiple language support, GIS and mapping functions) are being developed to give users more tools to explore and analyze marine biodiversity data.
We acknowledge support by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation of USA for supporting the OBIS Secretariat and the Portal.