Contribute to OBIS

This text is an extract from the OBIS manual. Read more here

Since 2000, OBIS has accepted, curated and published marine biodiversity data obtained by varied sources and methods. There is a common misconception that OBIS only accepts species occurrence data - however this is not true! OBIS can accept many types of marine data including:

• Point, polygon, and/or line transect data
• Presence/Absence
• Abundance, individual count
• Biomass
• Abiotic measurements
• Biotic measurements
• Sampling methods
• Sample processing methods
• Genetic data including DNA sequences
• Data originating from historical records
• Tracking data
• Habitat data
• Acoustic data
• Imaging data
• Metadata describing the dataset and any project or programme related metadata

So if you have any of these types of marine data linked to your occurrence data and also want to contribute to OBIS - great! OBIS accepts data from any organization, consortium, project or individual who wants to contribute data. OBIS Data Sources are the authors, editors, and/or organisations that have published one or more datasets through OBIS. They remain the owners or custodians of the data, not OBIS!

OBIS harvests and publishes data from recognized IPTs from OBIS nodes or GBIF publishers. If you own data or have the right to publish data in OBIS, you can contact the OBIS secretariat or one of the OBIS nodes, or additionally a GBIF publisher. Your organization or programme can also become an OBIS node. An OBIS node usually publishes data from multiple data holders, effectively being a node in a network of data providers. So you may have to first find a relevant node before you get your data ready to publish.

To publish a dataset to OBIS, there are five main steps you must go through.

1. First, you must identify which OBIS node is best suited to host your published data. If you would like to publish to GBIF at the same time, that is also possible. If your organization is already affiliated with a GBIF node with which you must publish from, OBIS can also harvest from GBIF nodes.
2. Second, you must determine the structure of your data and which format will best suit your dataset. OBIS follows Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) standards for datasets, and currently follows a star schema format. This format is based on relational databases. If you are unfamiliar with such database structures, or would like to refamiliarize yourself with them, please read here
3. Then, you need to actually format your data according to OBIS and DwC-A standards and guidelines
4. Once formatted, you should run a series of quality control measures to ensure you are not missing any required information and that all standards are being met. This helps ensure all data published in OBIS is formatted in a standardized way. When published in OBIS, OBIS provides a quality report to inform data owners and users of any quality control issues. By completing quality control before you publish your dataset you ensure there are fewer errors to fix later.
5. Now that your dataset is ready for publishing, the relevant metadata must be filled in, and then published on the previously identified IPT.

Each of these steps are covered in detail in the relevant sections of the manual. For an overview of this process see data management flow in OBIS.

Interested? Read more in the OBIS manual