Report prepared for the Experts Meeting Towards the Implementation of a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN), 6-8 April, 2004. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
I - i
8/30/2004
Appendix I
DRAFT
Technical Framework for a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN)
Workshop on the Global Invasive Species Information Network
Baltimore, MD April 6-8- 2004
James F. Quinn, University of California, Davis, jfquinnATucdavis.edu
The Challenge
Invasive species represent one of the foremost challenges to the integrity of agriculture,
natural ecosystems, and biodiversity in the 21
st
century. Invasive species cost human
societies hundreds of billions of dollars per year in control costs and losses to agricultural
production, human health, and ecosystem services, far exceeding the combined cost of
natural disasters such as floods, wildfires, oil spills, and earthquakes. It is now accepted that
non-native plants, predators, and diseases rival land conversion as a cause of extinction.
The challenge is global. Increasing movement of people and biological products in global
travel and trade render every landscape on earth vulnerable to new infestations. Freely
available information on sources, identities, modes of transport, and successes and failures
of past control efforts provide our best protection against the onslaught of new invaders.
Achieving a shared language and building a scalable network for exchanging this
information among hundreds of governments and thousands of data providers and users
poses new challenges in both informatics and technical cooperation.
Principles
A successful network for sharing invasive species information among hundreds of diverse
participants using several languages will need to be highly distributed and ultimately highly
scalable. Organizing principles for success include:
Some of the most important information is developed by people and institutions with
minimal technical resources. Therefore, the minimum equipment, software, and
computational expertise required for participation should be simple
Public information should be freely available, including to those using only free, open
source, or public domain software and tools. Proprietary and commercial services should
be free to repackage governmental invasive species information and provide added
value to users of public data. However, invasive species policy requires the widest
possible public awareness. Unless the critical information needed to recognize and
manage invasive species is freely available on public sites and discoverable through
widely used search technologies (e.g., Google™), many land managers, farmers, and
schools will not find the information they need.
The network should adopt widely used technical standards whenever feasible. At
present, this implies embracing World-Wide Web technologies, especially XML
(Extensible Mark-up Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework), and related
technologies emerging as the “semantic web”.
Successful sharing of information requires agreement on the vocabularies that may be
used to describe comparable objects or concepts in different information sources.
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