News
On the 1st of July, during the GBIF Global Nodes Meeting 2021, OBIS and GBIF nodes held a joint meeting for the first time in history. The OBIS secretariat and nodes organized a marine data mobilization session, where the objective was to update the community on the collaboration between GBIF and OBIS and discuss opportunities to work together on marine data mobilization. Participants from 14 GBIF nodes and 10 OBIS nodes joined for a discussion on how marine data could be optimized for sharing between the two data systems. The focal topics for the session included GBIF nodes publishing their marine data to OBIS and what the preferred strategy could be for publishing.
Prerecorded presentations introducing OBIS and its data management practices, showcasing the similarities and differences between OBIS and GBIF, and the data formatting requirements between the two databases were provided. The presentations and the recording of the full session are available to watch here.
Compared to GBIF, OBIS uses the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) as the taxonomic backbone, requires geographic coordinates along with data and performs additional quality checks on data fields important for marine datasets like depth. In addition, in OBIS the Extended Measurement or Fact extension (EMoF) allows linking environmental data and sampling facts to sampling events, as well as biological measurements to occurrences in a flexible and standardized manner.
The main benefits of publishing to OBIS (in addition to GBIF), included reaching a larger audience with the increase in visibility and usability of the data. For example, due to the links to IOC-UNESCO, data in OBIS is often directly used in UN processes. On the other hand, the main challenges related to publishing in OBIS were related to the difficulties utilizing defined vocabularies and the EMoF data in general, as well as informing the data owners about OBIS and receiving permissions for data publishing.
To begin promoting the mobilization of marine data to OBIS, the group suggested the following:
This meeting marks the beginning of a new era of communication in the biodiversity data space, and will encourage the further incorporation of datasets between the two systems, and ultimately to help build a fully comprehensive global marine biodiversity database.