A Step Toward Unification

Abstract

Contrary to the view of biodiversity informatics (BI) depicted in the News of the Week story “Biodiversity databases spread, prompting unification call” (C. Thomas, 26 June, p. [1632][1]), substantial progress has been made in the past few years, particularly since the advent of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2001. GBIF is not a project, as depicted in the News story, but a multi-country agreement to establish an international organization, modeled on other international treaties. An initial 17 countries (mandated through their Science Ministries) negotiated the establishment of GBIF as a commonly owned and commonly funded mechanism to meet their common BI challenges. The Memorandum of Understanding that each country signs commits them to contributing financially and to supporting free and universal sharing of their data. As such, GBIF has a sustainable funding model to support an international secretariat and implementation of an agreed work program as well as the mandate to build the infrastructure needed to make biodiversity data freely accessible to all through the Internet. Through various community-owned initiatives and partnerships, GBIF has overcome many of the BI challenges highlighted in the News of the Week story as still problematic, including the development of global standards, data-sharing protocols, best practices in areas such as digitization and data cleansing, and increasingly, in developing metadata standards and registries, ontologies, and spatial analysis applications. GBIF is admittedly still a work in progress, yet it provides the international foundation through which solutions to these complex problems can be developed. In terms of collaboration and interoperability, GBIF has a growing membership of 51 countries and 42 international organizations (most of whom were represented at the e-Biosphere conference) and already provides access to over 180 million primary biodiversity records in more than 7600 data sets from more than 265 institutions around the world. This is undoubtedly a unification success story, albeit with much still to be done. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.324_1632