In August 2020 OBIS and GBIF signed a joint letter of agreement on developing the scope for closer collaboration. OBIS (Ocean Biodiversity Information System) and GBIF share many research data infrastructure components (including the Integrated Data Publishing Toolkit, IPT) and common data standards from the Biodiversity Information Standards Organisation (TDWG) including Darwin Core. OBIS and GBIF have made progress towards shared informatics solutions since the collaboration agreement. The collaboration meeting wanted to explore further synergy and efficiency gains from both informatics and governance solutions.
Discussion topics included:
eMoF: Expanding the OBIS and GBIF beyond species occurrences. OBIS has developed an expanded Measurement or Fact (eMoF) application schema for the IPT (De Pootier et al 2017). OBIS needs the eMoF to be further integrated with the GBIF informatics pipelines for OBIS to benefit from this invention and utilize GBIF aggregation services. Including improved support in GBIF for the Event core + eMoF data model.
WoRMS: While the scope of GBIF includes the biodiversity of all species, the scope of OBIS is focused on the biodiversity of marine species. The definition of what is a marine species largely follows the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) (also available in GBIF at doi:10.14284/170). OBIS data aggregation services require the WoRMS species ID (AphiaID) to be provided with the Darwin Core Scientific Name Identifier (dwc:scientificNameID) metadata term. To benefit from and utilize GBIF data aggregation services OBIS requires AphiaIDs (for the marine species) to be included in the data sets from the data publishing source (GBIF nodes could facilitate this) or for the GBIF informatics team to append AphiaIDs during ingestion of datasets in the GBIF data portal (based on a mapping between the GBIF taxon backbone and WoRMS).
As a follow-up to the meeting, GBIF Norway was encouraged by OBIS to explore establishing a Norwegian OBIS node. GBIF Norway is currently exploring this.
