Title:
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility's Network as a Model for GISIN
Presenter:
Hannu Saarenmaa
Authors:
Hannu Saarenmaa, Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat
Abstract:
The aim of the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN) is to provide a platform and information infrastructure for sharing invasive species information at a global level, via the Internet and other digital means, and also offer a central place for the reporting and tracking of new alien species sightings. The GISIN needs to link together hundreds of databases and web sites that provide this information. A similar problem has successfully been addressed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which currently makes available 45 million records of primary biodiversity data from 300 databases on 90 data providers. The GBIF network has been built on the principles of web services, which has infrastructure components such as a central UDDI registry, a coordinated parallelized indexing process, several thematic and national data portals, and a large number of distributed data providers. The presentation discusses how a similar architecture might fit for GISIN, which also deals with aggregated information at the species level, originating from a large number of distributed sources. GBIF will also have to address a similar problem soon when its Species Bank program area gets started. A possible solution consisting of distributed authoring, publishing, discovery, and integration of small species fact sheet fragments, is outlined in the talk.