News

Report of the 8th Session of the OBIS steering group, 5-8 November 2019, Santa Marta, Colombia

Report

Executive Summary

30 participants from 21 countries (representing 21 OBIS nodes) participated in the 8th Session of the IODE Steering Group for-OBIS (SG-OBIS), 5-8 November 2019, in Santa Marta, Colombia, hosted by the Marine and Coastal Research Institute (INVEMAR).

In 2019, 5.4 million presence records were added to OBIS from 439 new datasets, providing 5,170 new marine species to OBIS. In total, OBIS now has 57.5 million occurrences of 126,570 species from 2,972 datasets (69.5 million total occurrences of which 10 million absence records and 2 million dropped records). A milestone in 2019 was the switch to the new OBIS infrastructure and technology stack (OBIS2.0). This new OBIS system supports continuous data harvesting from OBIS Nodes for near-real time updates. The new system does automated processing (QC) of ingested data and completes the data integration routines within minutes to an hour. The system is now also fully aligned with the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), which means that records are dropped when species names that are not in WoRMS or listed as non-marine. The information portal also provides details on quality issues and a more powerful mapper allows the users to visualize, filter, explore and download millions of records.

During the SG session, participants evaluated current and future value propositions provided or aspired to by the OBIS community and the associated demands for work activity if the highest priority values are to be delivered. This resulted in a list of specific actions and recommendations for each of the task teams, project teams and secretariat along with commitments from SG members to contribute throughout the year.

More specifically, the OBIS vocabulary infrastructure project team, in collaboration with the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) group, will review, evaluate and produce a registry of vocabularies in use in OBIS. In addition, the group will adopt and/or develop and test methodologies for developing community consensus on the logical mappings from simple term values in the properties of the data model that should be aligned with vocabulary identifiers.

An OBIS Data Quality Assessment and Enhancement Project Team is established to finalize work on documenting the logical data flow through the OBIS system from source data processing at OBIS Nodes to the data processing pipeline into the OBIS integrated database. The quality assessment (or fitness-for-use assessment) steps will be documented and logically organized and then translated into process code/function changes. This will also help the OBIS Capacity Development Task Team, who will, in collaboration with the OceanTeacher Global Academy, organize a “Training of Trainers” certification course, to level up the capacities of the node managers and data managers in the new OBIS technologies and methods.

In May 2020, OBIS will reach a milestone anniversary of 20 years. Under the aegis of the OBIS Communications and Outreach Task Team, an OBIS 20th Anniversary Project Team has been established to develop plans and relationships for a celebration and major marketing push for OBIS. The OBIS Communications and Outreach Task Team will also develop a slate of outreach materials, including policy briefs on priority value propositions and relatively simple marketing material.

The OBIS steering group unanimously approved the proposal to change the name of OBIS from Ocean Biogeographic Information System to Ocean Biodiversity Information System and wants to recommend this name change for adoption by the IODE Management Group, to be followed by a report on the name change to the IOC Executive Council in June 2020.

To strengthen our relationship with key stakeholders and seek advice from external users in the future directions of OBIS, the OBIS Strategic Advisory Task Team will organize its first meeting in the first half of 2020. The OBIS Node Managers are also asked to establish strong relationships with their national or regional partners, such as national GBIF Nodes and IPBES focal points.

The OBIS steering group expressed deep appreciation to Eduardo Klein who served his two terms as SG-OBIS co-chair and welcomed Martha Vides as the new incoming co-chair.

The next (9th) session will be held in Oostende on 17-20 November 2020.