The Global Biodiversity Information Facility

"Biodiversity or biological diversity means the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems" (Convention on Biological Diversity, Art. 2, para. 1). The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (www.gbif.org) mission is to make the world's biodiversity data freely and universally available via the Internet. GBIF was established and is being maintained by an ever-growing consortium of forward-thinking countries, economies and international organizations. Its charge is to carry out specific tasks that are essential to a worldwide infrastructure that can overcome current barriers to the universal availability of species-level biodiversity information. Significant parts of the tripartite (gene, species, ecosystem) biodiversity information resource are already online, such as the DNA data served by GenBank, EMBL and DDBJ and other sequence (RNA, protein, etc.) data served by various sources such as RNAbase, SCOR and ExPASy. These community research resources have already contributed substantially to medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and through these to society, which has footed the bills for the establishment and maintenance of the digital information resources. Ecological, ecosystem and planet-wide data are provided online by, for example, MABnet and LTERnet, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through its Mission to Planet Earth (MPE) and other national and bi- or trilateral consortia. These online ecological resources are just beginning to be thoroughly analyzed and the results synthesized into larger understandings of the functioning of the natural systems of our planet. Nonetheless, they hold great promise for predictive modeling of global climate change and other large-scale ecological phenomena. Though there are areas of the world that still do not have either full access to the Internet or the onsite infrastructure to fully utilize data that might be received (one hopes that this situation will be rectified in the near future), the molecular and ecological data discussed above are available to anyone and everyone with an Internet connection. One of the reasons that this is so is that the available data have all been collected in the past few decades, during the age of computers. The piece, in fact the anchor stone, of biodiversity information that to-date has been missing from digital availability is data about individuals, populations and species of whole organisms. These data are not online because most pre-date the computer age. They have been collected over nearly three centuries and recorded in the only medium available: paper and ink. These data are on the labels of natural history specimens, in libraries and in handwritten notebooks or typewritten card files. Species-occurrence data are essential to many kinds of analyses, and one of GBIF's four major areas of work is aimed at making these data digital and therefore more useful and available. All of GBIF's tasks are aimed at making digitally available the bridging pieces (data about individuals, populations and species) that tie the whole biodiversity information pattern together (see Figure 1). Without the Taxonomic Name Service (a function that uses both the Registry of Shared Biodiversity Information and the Electronic Catalogue of Scientific Names) that will be provided by GBIF, there is no way to obtain a seamless response to a query that requires a call upon both ecological and molecular data, such as "What other organisms live in the same kinds of habitats as this one from which I have extracted a gene that enables it to tolerate high levels of lead acetate, and are able to do so because of either homologous or analogous gene function?" The pieces of biodiversity (gene, species, ecosystems) information. The tasks that GBIF will carry out provide the center pieces that tie the other pieces together. Each of the three information sub-domains (gene, species, ecosystems) will want to generate its own specialized search engines. However, the Electronic Calalogue of Scientific Names is a GBIF partnership task that will facilitate searches across all the sub-domains for a single query because a scientific name is often the only data field common to databases in all three sub-domains. It can also alleviate some of the faced by sequence databases regarding taxonomic classifications (dotted arrow, uper left). Because primary specimine data can be analyzed to predict the characteristics of a species' habitat, queries about the ecological role of particular genes can be posed. Rapid answers to search questions have never before been possible. The registry of shared biodiversity data facilitates searching and can serve as a major link among the sub-domains and to the growing digital library of biodiversity information and the secondary datasets of the members of the Biodiversity Commons. The first generation GBIF information architecture will be online by the end of 2003; the growth of the electronic calatogue is underway, but is expected to take approximately 10 years to achieve 90% of all names. Digitization of natural history specimens has begun, but needs substantially more investment to speed the work. (Source: GBIF) The beauty of digital data is that they can be used over and over again and in many ways. The same information can be put to many purposes by the whole variety of users in the world. Investments made in digitizing scientific data and bringing them online via well-planned information architecture are paid back many times over. Not least of these repayments is that these data are now usable by people other than scientists. The ultimate source of global and national wealth is natural resources. Biodiversity, the living portion of natural resources, provides an ever-increasing portion of that wealth. Biodiversity has provided the basis of human survival (clean water and air, food, fuel and fiber), not to mention prosperity, since Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth. If we humans are to continue to prosper and to leave future generations a healthy place in which to live, we must learn to use living resources in a sustainable way and make it possible for all peoples to share in the benefits of the sustainable use of biodiversity. If the economic and survival benefits provided by biodiversity are to be equitably shared globally, as required by the Convention on Biological Diversity, a number of factors must be overcome. Primary among these is the need for access to scientific data and information about biodiversity to be as easy and complete in Mongolia or Madras as it is in Madrid or Munich. If scientific advances regarding biodiversity are to be made by any and all of the talents around the world that can contribute to them, access to the data and results that have already been generated must be as easily and fully available, wherever the researcher. The GBIF biodiversity informatics infrastructure has two equally important components: Computational (standards, interoperability and search engines) Content (particularly primary scientific data that are currently "imprisoned" by paper and ink or other, nondigital media) GBIF is also aware of the digital divide faced by many of the most biodiverse countries and, therefore, undertakes capacity-building activities to help overcome these challenges. At present GBIF is focusing on making primary, species-level biodiversity data available via the Internet. Primary data are those derived from the direct observation of nature, such as the labels on natural history specimens or culture tubes. Eventually, GBIF will include in its purview secondary data which have been derived through some manipulation of primary data, such as an analysis of pattern or process. This task will likely be done in close collaboration with digital library efforts, as well as the Biodiversity Commons. However, the immediate need is to provide, via the Internet, the label data from more than two billion natural history specimens and uncounted culture collections. GBIF is an international organization in its own right. Importantly, GBIF is open to participation by all countries, economic entities and organizations that can benefit from the open sharing of biodiversity information on a global scale. Unlike other megascience facilities that are built of bricks and mortar, GBIF operates as a virtual facility. The bricks of this facility are the databases, other information resources and informatics tools made available by GBIF participants. The mortar that holds the bricks together is the informatics infrastructure (software tools and the Internet). It is staffed by a small secretariat (14 positions) that works internationally to coordinate national, regional and local biodiversity informatics efforts and bring focus to the activities of the organization as it develops GBIF. GBIF is distributed and encourages cooperation and coherence; it is global in scale, though implemented regionally, nationally and locally. GBIF, through relationships built by its secretariat staff, works closely with many producers and providers of biodiversity information as well as with its users. In some ways GBIF has the characteristics of a large, distributed public-domain database with a number of interlinked and interoperable modules such as data stores, software and networking tools, search engines and analytical algorithms that enable users to navigate and use the data. It differs from such a unitary database, however, in that it is more comprehensive in content and much more complex in its interconnections. In summary, the GBIF strategy includes: Focus on its mission and specific goals, with intermediate milestones identified in each year's work program; Outreach to developing countries; Inclusiveness in the manner in which it seeks advice; Openness in data sharing and software developments; Cost-effectiveness in its partnerships with like-minded organizations; and Fund-raising efforts to enhance its product and speed up its activities.