Vanden Berghe, E.

Open Marine Archive

15MarBEF NewsletterAutumn 2006
MarBEF Progress
By Edward Vanden Berghe
For some time now, EurOBIS development
is completed, and the system has been
running smoothly since it came online in
June 2004. Progress has been quantitative
rather than qualitative; the main systems
have been built, and are being gradually
filled. Growth is presented graphically in
Figure 1. At the time of writing, there were
over 3,400,000 distribution records,
coming from 42 different data collections.
Looking at Figure 1, it is immediately
obvious that there is a great variation in
size between the different data
collections; actually, the difference is more
than what is apparent from the graph –
the smallest collections are not visible in
the graph. One might argue that dealing
with these small data collections is not
cost-effective, and that we only should
deal with the large ones. Obviously, this is
not the view we take. First of all, the large
collections are often hosted in institutes
that have quite a bit of data management
expertise, and were often already available
online through the website of the data
custodian. It’s with the smaller collections
that EurOBIS makes a difference: these
would not be available unless they were
included in EurOBIS. It is also these small
collections that run the risk of
disappearing completely, dying a slow
death in a shoebox or having their last
moments on a floppy disk on top of a
loudspeaker. Contributing to the
preservation of biodiversity information,
these small datasets are one of the tasks
of the data management of MarBEF.
EurOBIS is supported by several other
data- and information systems.
Documentation of the dataset, including
data collectors, projects and publications
based on the data is done through IMIS,
also visible as the ‘Register of Resources’
on the MarBEF site. The geography is
standardised through a Gazetteer, which is
visible as a separate system through the
VLIZ website (http://www.vliz.be/vmdc
data/vlimar/). And taxonomy is
standardised through the European
Register of Marine Species. Both the
gazetteer and ERMS are classifications,
and use the hierarchies to support
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS, is both the marine
component of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the
Information component of the Census of Marine Life (CoML). Its
international portal is hosted by Rutgers University in New Jersey.
EurOBIS is one of a growing family of regional OBIS nodes. Through
these regional nodes, OBIS is brought closer to the regional scientific
communities, and is better equipped to support these scientists in
making their biogeographical data available through web-based systems.
searching and browsing. The hierarchies make it possible
to ask such questions as ‘Which Echinodermata live in
Belgium?’ Chances are that there is not a single record
for Echinodermata in Belgium – but the system knows
that, for example, Zeebrugge and Oostende are both in
Belgium, and that Asterias rubens and Amphiura filiformis
are Echinodermata, and return a complete list.
Well over three million distribution records sounds like a
lot of data. But we know that there are many more
datasets that have been collected in the past, and are
still being collected. We hope that the MarBEF
community is now convinced of the benefits of data
sharing, and that many more datasets will be made
available for inclusion in EurOBIS.
EUROBIS: growing
in numbers
Fig 1. Growth of EurOBIS. Colours are different data
collections. See website for legend of colour coding:
http://www.marbef.org/data/eurobisproviders.php.
Fig 2. Data systems supporting EurOBIS. ‘Species characteristics’ and ‘Habitats’, shown
in italics, are both possible extensions that are not implemented yet.
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Starfish eating sea potato.
Curonian Lagoon.


EUROBIS: growing in numbers

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