Korean Bio-resource Information System (KOBIS): the Nationwide Infrastructure for Collecting and Integrating Biological Resource Information in Korea

Abstract

As a national center for managing biological data, the Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC) provides capabilities and resources to manage and standardize the explosively growing amount of biological data from national Research and Development grants by developing a systematic and integrative approach. The biological data includes biological material resource, genome, and biodiversity data, such as observation, collection, taxonomy, character, and genome information of living organisms. The Korean government has enacted legislature for the collection, management and utilization of biological data in 2009 and, as a follow-up, KOBIC has undertaken the mission to collect and integrate the scattered biological data in Korea. We first made a biological data format for exchanging data between government agencies. After that, the Korean Bio-resource Information System (KOBIS) has been developed. KOBIS is an integrated information system for efficient acquisition and systematic management of biological data. KOBIS contains more than 109,000 species and 12.1 million occurrence records from 107 collaborating institutions from four ministries. KOBIS is a system that establishes a catalog of scientific names by linking species information by ministries. The main function is integrated information search. The results of integrated information search show character information, bibliographic information, electronic book, DNA classification, gene information, photo image, and research achievement. We will continue to focus our efforts on the management of KOBIS for facilitation of information sharing, distribution, and service towards mining biological data. KOBIS is available at http://www.kobis.re.kr.