Aligning GBIF and the Atlas of Living Australia

Abstract

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are two interconnected leading infrastructures serving the biodiversity community. Recognising that significant overlap exists in the function of the systems run by both organisations, and that advancement in technology allows GBIF to offer more functionality, we have initiated a process to align these infrastructures. Such a move is expected to bring the benefits of consistent data handling, improved bibliographic citation tracking, coordinated deployment of new features across the entire data publishing community, better reuse of modules and an overall reduction in cost of development, deployment and operation. This year, work has commenced to align these two infrastructures, focussing initially on data ingestion pipelines. The GBIF and ALA teams are collaborating closely, working on the same codebase, developing common working practices and agreeing on tools and coding standards. This focus on collaboration will lead to a defined model for the Living Atlas community to provide contributions. This work will also further the efforts to hand ownership of core ALA systems to the Living Atlas community and pave the way for the Living Atlas community to transition to the adoption of GBIF systems. Later this year, efforts will move towards use of a common registry for organisations, collections, datasets and associated metadata, which will reduce the effort spent in curating content, while also improving consistency by removing the need for synchronisation.