Aligning GBIF.org and the Atlas of Living Australia

Abstract

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are two well-connected leading infrastructures serving the biodiversity community. As the national node for GBIF, the ALA serves to provide rich, localized services for the community of users in Australia and also acts as the gateway for datasets being shared internationally on GBIF.org. While these explorations target collaboration initially with Australia, we anticipate this may be of interest to other adopters of the Living Atlas platform in the future. We will give an update of the state of progress to date, along with lessons learnt and summarise a roadmap for the future. Recognising that significant overlap exists in the function of the systems, and that advancement in technology allows GBIF.org to offer more functionality, we have initiated a process of exploring better alignment of these infrastructures. Such a move is expected to bring the benefits of consistent data handling, improved 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. Our initial areas of exploration focuses on two specific components which are common to most biodiversity portals: a registry of datasets and the indexing of occurrence data. Use of a common registry for organisations, collections, datasets and associated metadata will reduce the effort spent in curating content, while also improving consistency by removing the need for synchronisation. In addition, a revised data pipeline for the indexing of occurrence records that powers both GBIF.org and ALA is anticipated to accommodate features such as consistent flagging of data quality issues and standardised practice for citation and tracking citations.