Fábio Lang da Silveira – http://obissa.cria.org.brThis talk on behalf of OBIS International Committee

and OBIS North & South America Nodes

USP – Zoology Depart., IB

fldsilve@usp.br

www.iobis.org

What is OBIS?

OBIS is the information component of The Census of Marine Life (CoML), a growing global network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a ten-year initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans - past, present, and future.

OBIS is a web-based provider of global geo-referenced information on marine species.

www.coml.org

What OBIS Provides

• Access to marine species data from around the world– species or genus (exceptionally higher

taxonomic group observed or collected) at a latitude/longitude location

– from museum collections, management agencies, research institutions, etc.

• Software tools to use these data effectively for research, management and education

OBIS is not like Google

• OBIS facilitates access to data records, not datasets– find all organisms recorded from a particular

location– find all places a particular taxon has been

found– download data in a variety of easy to use

formats

OBIS Technology

• Distributed datasets connected via DiGIR and the OBIS Schema, an extension to the Darwin Core V2.

• Data are regularly crawled and cached locally (and indexed) to improve performance.

• Quality Control– Names are matched against the Catalog of Life– Questionable points (e.g. on land, 0-0 location) are

returned to the data provider for checking– Dataset without metadata will not be posted

OBIS Growth

• May, 20069.5 m records, 61,000 species, 113 databases

• April, 200713.1 m records, 79,000 species, 206 databases

www.iobis.org

Ablenne hians

Fishbase

Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)

Discovery Metadata

See also - http://gcmd.nasa.gov/

OBIS Record Schema(mandatory)

• What (Taxonomic name): species or genus, subspecies, authority, family, order....

• Where: latitude, longitude, depth, place name, precision

• When: last update (automatic), month, day, year, time of collection

• Who: institution serving dataset, collection code, catalog number, collector, identifier, dataset name,

• How Many: number caught, number preserved• Other: source of record, life stage, type status, etc.

OBIS Record Schema(highly recommended)

• An abbreviation indicating whether the record represents:

- an observation (O) (this can include a visual observation, a survey catch, a commercial landing record, etc)

- a collected living organism (L) - a specimen in a collection/museum (S) - a collected germplasm/seed (G) - a photo (P) - derived from literature, where original basis

unknown (D).

CanadaCanada

Sub SaharanSub SaharanAfricaAfrica

EuropeEurope

United StatesUnited StatesOf AmericaOf America

AustraliaAustralia

NewNewZealandZealand

IndianIndianOceanOcean

JapanJapan

ChinaChina

KoreaKorea

AntarcticaAntarctica

Regional OBIS Nodes (RONS)

RON Managers Committee

ChileChileArgentinaArgentina

BrazilBrazil

OBISMC6 at SaoSebastiao, BrazilApril 16-17, 2007

**

About OBIS in South America

• SA nodes => full node status• OBIS Tropical and Subtropical Southwest

Atlantic (BR) provides Portuguese language interface

• OBIS Southern Atlantic (AR) provides Spanish language interface

• OBIS (BR) first node to implement special deep web linking to national data collections

**16661 records16661 records INVERMAR - Colombia INVERMAR - Colombia

Questions?

GraciasThank youObrigado

Additional Information?