Ocean Biogeographic Information System

4/14/2006 7:00 PM

Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS): Support for OBIS Activities and Secretariat Office

Draft for Review

A request for continuation of support by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation submitted by the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

J. Frederick Grassle Director, OBIS Secretariat

Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Rutgers University

17 April 2006

Amount requested: $800,000 Year One (1 July 2006 – 30 June): $400,000 Year Two (1 July 2006 – 30 June: $400,000

______J. Frederick Grassle Date Director, OBIS Secretariat I. Executive Summary

The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is an authoritative, web-based provider of publicly-available, geospatial information on marine species and their environment. It is also a rapidly-developing international science infrastructure that provides access to data content, data integration, and informatics tools (maps), and is developing other visualizations and products using combinations of data. Our goals in 2008 include an inventory (census) of all marine species, and implementation of a global 4-D (the three dimensions of space plus time) on-line atlas of biogeographic information (OBIS Five-Year Plan 2003, Appendix A, Mission and

Goals). OBIS will be expected to: 1) serve the needs of the scientific community, governments (at all levels and areas of responsibility), international organizations

(IOC/IODE, GBIF, GOOS, SCOR, IUCN, IABO, Diversitas), conservation organizations (CI, NC, WCMC), the oil and gas industry (contacts with EXXON, BP,

TOTAL, and PETROBRAS); 2) develop standards and protocols for marine data interoperability; 3) conduct basic research supported by the NSF, EU, CSIRO, Alfred

P. Sloan Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; 4) contribute to marine science education (see http://iobis.org/edu/); 5) provide data on marine organisms for use in medicine (link to NCBI); 6) provide information for environmental consultants; and 7) inform the general public (Appendix B defines acronyms used). To accomplish this, OBIS needs to be active in: 1) integration and interoperation of physical, chemical, geological, and other types of environmental data to address biogeographic, ecological, evolutionary, and management questions;

2) data quality control and quality assurance; 3) standards for dataset interoperation, including protocols for spatial and temporal data modeling and exchange, data

2 exchange formats, vocabularies for interoperation, and web-service standards for making marine information available.

OBIS aims to be the leading source of quality-controlled, primary data on marine species’ distributions at global to regional scales. Time-efficient online tools will facilitate data discovery, exploration, visualization, analysis, and capture, and provide access to additional information on species (e.g. images, genetic barcodes, phylogenetic position, species characteristics, habitat, trophic relationships, resource economics and conservation relevance). At present, a high proportion of geographically-referenced information on distributions, abundance, and movements of marine species is lost or remains generally unavailable. To address this problem,

OBIS is successfully gathering and publishing a significant portion of such data.

II. The Scientific and Societal Value of OBIS

Among the legacies of CoML in 2010 will be the first global census of life in the oceans. This will be fully accessible through OBIS. Because of their vast area, volume, and diversity of life, the world’s oceans are the dominant component of the biosphere. Thus, an assessment of life on Earth must, in major part, be an assessment of life in the ocean – a Census of Marine Life. Observed changes in polar ice and shifts in distributions of marine and terrestrial species have emphasized the need for global assessments. A group of 62 member countries, the European Commission, and

43 participating organizations, have formed the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) dedicated to developing and instituting a Global Earth Observation System of Systems

(GEOSS). Two of the nine Societal Benefit Areas identified in The Global Earth

Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) 10-Year Implementation Plan (16 February

2005) are: “Ecosystems: Improving management and protection of terrestrial, coastal and marine resources” and “Biodiversity: Understanding, monitoring and conserving

3 biodiversity.” The functional components of GEOSS are related to identification of user requirements, data acquisition and development into useful products: exchange, dissemination, archiving of shared data, metadata and products, and performance monitoring. OBIS is working toward developing widely-accessible, useful data products relevant to the “Ecosystems” and “Biodiversity” goals of GEOSS. OBIS will also work with the 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership

(http://www.twentyten.net/, formed by over 40 international organizations (including

FAO, GEF, IUCN OECD, UNEP-WCMC, UNESCO, WHO, WWF). We will be working in concert with these organizations to develop the OBIS part of the CoML

2010 report.

At present, OBIS provides the most accessible, comprehensive single source of data on marine species’ distributions, but we have a long way to go to achieve the full potential of OBIS. By 2010 OBIS will contain the first CoML benchmark for use by future generations. These data, along with historical data published in OBIS, will be the starting point for continued assessment and better understanding of life in the oceans. Beyond 2010, development of new databases and information technologies in

OBIS, CBOL, GOOS, and a digital “Encyclopedia of Life” will provide a more rational basis for human interactions with, and protection of, life in the oceans.

Traditional, discipline-centric research methodologies will continue to yield a wealth of snapshots of the complex and ever-changing marine world. A major challenge for

OBIS will be to assimilate these disparate results in contexts that will reveal coherent patterns of marine species and their environment. Such patterns will serve as testable hypotheses leading to predictive models for understanding the origin and conditions for survival of marine species.

4 OBIS is the information component of the Census of Marine Life (CoML) as well as a rapidly developing international science infrastructure. Ten regional nodes

(Appendix C) and ten CoML Field Projects are functional contributors of OBIS data.

Through National and Regional Implementation Committees (NRICs) the Field

Projects are extending their sampling to achieve greater global coverage and will be contributing data to OBIS at a sharply increasing rate. OBIS provides data content, information infrastructure, and informatics tools (maps, visualizations, and products from models), through an on-line atlas of biogeographic information. The wide and detailed scope of OBIS offers new challenges in data management, scientific cooperation and organization, and innovative approaches to data analysis. The online, digital atlas developed by OBIS will provide a basis for societal and governmental decisions on how to harvest and conserve marine life.

III. Goals and Accomplishments

A list of major goals of OBIS Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ’04-’06 grant follows. Each goal (shown in bold letters) is followed by a short statement of relevant accomplishments.

1. Increase the size of the OBIS to over 6 million species’ records in three years

During the last grant period, OBIS has far exceeded this goal and has grown from 1.3 million to 9 million records and the number of datasets has grown from 14 to

108. Additional commitments of data are being received at a steady pace.

2. Gain support for OBIS from an international federation of Regional OBIS

Nodes (RONs)

The most signal accomplishment of the OBIS Secretariat since January ’04 has been the establishment of the ten Regional OBIS Nodes (RONs). Contracts for regional node development and transfer of data to OBIS were signed between Rutgers

5 University and institutions in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (South American Node),

Australia (Australian Node), India (Indian Ocean Node), New Zealand (Southwestern

Pacific Node), and South Africa (Southern African Node), and partnerships have also been developed with major ocean database institutions in Canada, China, Europe,

Japan, and the United States (see Appendix C). The Managers of all ten RONs, members of the CoML International Committee (IC), and the OBIS Technical

Working Group meet 2-3 times a year. At these meetings, the RONs managers have shown that they are a strong team ready to take long-term responsibility for an integrated OBIS system (see www.iobis.org/obiscommittee/obismanagement for their reports). Because the RON subcontracts expire in December 2006, a joint meeting of the IC and MC will be held in May 2006 to discuss the best long term governance and management strategies for OBIS considering available resources.

The next two years will be a period of rapid data acquisition through Regional

OBIS Nodes (RONs), CoML Field Projects (Appendix D), and organized groups of taxonomic experts (e.g. CrustaceaNet).

3. Develop the OBIS Portal into a 4-D (the three dimensions of space plus time), user-friendly atlas

A beta version of C-Square mapper was developed for the Portal in the first year of the grant and a second improved version has just been released. The OBIS

Portal has been greatly modified in look and feel, and additional functionalities suggested by consultants and user surveys have been added. Our initial search capability has been simplified and a Google Earth map provides pan and zoom capabilities and four scales (10, 5, 1, and 0.5 degree squares) of geographic search for all species in each specific area. The capability to search for all species within each nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and other biogeographically relevant areas

6 are being provided. A new version of the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) Mapper

(Daphne Fautin and Bob Buddemeier) adds why/where insights to the present what/where information in the Portal. This mapping system uses a global database of environmental variables to characterize the environmental envelope characteristic of each species and, by this extrapolation, to indicate areas where they might occur given the absence of barriers to dispersal. The ACON mapper (developed by Bob Branton and Jerry Black at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada) provides simultaneous information on more than one species, indicates abundance at each location, and can be used to show time series of abundance.

4. Achieve reliable 24/7 operations

The main OBIS Servers are directly connected to Internet II at the hub of the

Rutgers University computer network. A mirror site is about to be established at the

San Diego Supercomputer Center and a second mirror site will be installed at the

Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia.

The look and functionality of the web site has been greatly improved through updates of all of the mapping functions

5. Obtain broad acceptance of OBIS standards and protocols

The OBIS Data Schema, a backwardly-compatible extension of that used by

GBIF, is widely accepted and can be modified to meet most needs. OBIS will continue to work in accordance with international standards (e.g. ISO, FGDC,

GCMD, TDWG), and is at the forefront of development of standards for marine biodiversity data exchange. Discovery metadata (i.e. description of a dataset) has been produced that extends available FGDC, ISO and GCMD metadata because of their limitations in relation to biology and ecology. These metadata will soon be

7 published in OBIS format on the web site and will also be available through the

Global Change Master Directory (http://gcmd.nasa.gov).

6. Further develop a system of taxonomic quality control and quality assurance

Through quality checks by the portal staff and through user feedback, OBIS is enabling the databases it publishes to be corrected and become more useful.

Improvements to the OBIS Portal search and display capabilities are making it easier to see mistakes and recommend corrections. Species (especially common name) searches often provide a list of species names, which encourages users to review the results and recommend corrections. An Editorial Board of leading authorities on marine species is being formed to recommend additional quality control and quality assurance measures.

7. Link to sources of species-level information maintained by internationally- recognized taxonomic authorities

The Portal provides appropriate links to taxon-specific components of OBIS

(FishBase, SeaMap, Hexacorals, and CephBase) and sources of agreed-upon names

(Catalogue of Life). OBIS is developing strong links to the Barcode of Life and barcoding is expected to be valuable in resolving many taxonomic uncertainties.

Aquaspecies (through a group of organizations organized by Rainer Froese) and the uBio group at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole (see Remson, et al.

2006) are working on development of authoritative marine species pages for an

Encyclopedia of Life.

IV. OBIS Long-Term Strategy

A. Governments and User Communities

Some of the RONs are in government agencies that have already contributed to maintaining the Portal. As OBIS matures, governments, through the RONs, are

8 expected to take much greater ownership of OBIS. In the next two years we expect more governments to adopt OBIS, and we will also reach out to relevant industries.

The Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) has contributed to an OBIS

User Needs Assessment which will be the basis for business plan development (see

Appendix D, OBIS User Needs Assessment, March 2006). With support from the

Portal, Pat Halpin (of OBIS-SEAMAP; Associate Professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University and Chair of the OBIS Technical Committee) has just completed an evaluation of the relative merit of the three most prominent approaches to geographic information systems. Capabilities for searching the OBIS

Portal on-line will be continuously evaluated using new techniques for quality control and a newly-formed Editorial Board. New versions of OBIS will be developed at regular intervals over the next two years. These versions will aim to enhance the value of OBIS data and data products for a broad range of users.

B. OBIS Research

Participants in OBIS have been successful in obtaining research grants from government agencies. However, most of this research is on further development of the system and its capabilities and not research supported by the data in OBIS. For

OBIS to be successful as a community database for research on patterns of species’ distribution, the Secretariat will need to devote considerable effort to quality control and quality assurance, so that researchers and proposal reviewers have confidence in the data. Futhermore, funding to initiate the analysis of data directly from OBIS is critical to (a) demonstrate the added-value of data integration to the scientific community, and (b) determine priorities for future improvements to portal functionality.

9 In the U.S.A., Yunqing Zhang is the Principal Investigator on the NSF proposal: “An integrated Ocean Biogeographic Information System for knowledge discovery in bioinformatics.” which will be up for renewal this year. Howard Ho,

Project Manager and Research Scientist at IBM Almaden Research, has been collaborating with Yunqing Zhang to apply its “Clio” data integration system to marine bioinformatics. An OBIS component of the European Union Marine

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (MarBEF) network includes Mark Costello,

Rainer Froese of the OBIS IC, and Edward Vanden Berghe of the OBIS IC and MC.

Rainer Froese is also funded by an EU project “Integrating multiple demands on coastal zones with emphasis on aquatic ecosystems and fisheries (INCOFISH)” to provide authoritative species inventories and relevant data, and has a Pew Fellowship to produce an atlas of marine fish (i.e. geographic range of each species). An outreach part of CephBase is supported by an NSF grant related to pre-collegiate education. Karen Stocks and collaborators are using OBIS as a testbed for new bio- physical data integration tools being developed with funding from the Gordon and

Betty Moore Foundation.

Other research efforts are in progress at the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and Life Sciences supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research

(Patrick Halpin, Duke University), the Canadian Bedford Institute of Oceanography,

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (Bob Branton), Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization (Tony Rees), University of Kansas and Kansas Geological

Survey’s mapper (Daphne Fautin and Bob Buddemeier), and tools for determining species names (uBio) and species pages at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods

Hole (David Patterson and David Remsen). OBIS-related publications for 2004-2006 are shown in Appendix E.

10 V. OBIS Management

11 OBIS operates under the direction of the OBIS International Committee (IC)

(Appendix F), chaired by Mark Costello, Director of the Leigh Marine

Laboratory, University of Auckland. The Committee includes scientists with backgrounds in taxonomy, information technology, marine ecology, and oceanography. The Managers Committee (MC) is made up of the ten RON

Managers. This Committee is playing an increasingly important role as the

RONs become more established and better supported. A small Technical

Committee has overlap in its membership with the IC and MC: Rainer Froese

(www.fishbase.org/ and Kiel U.), Daphne Fautin (www.kgs.ku.edu/Hexacoral/ and U. of Kansas) Pat Halpin (http://seamap.env.duke.edu/ and Duke U.), Tony Rees

(http://www.obis.org.au/ and CSIRO), and Yunqing Zhang (http://iobis.org and

Rutgers University). The IC determines policy and provides guidance for the

OBIS Secretariat and Portal (F. Grassle, Director). The Secretariat and Portal work closely with all aspects of CoML through the efforts of the OBIS Program and Portal Managers (Y. Zhang) at Rutgers University who both report to the

Secretariat Director. Priorities are set by the IC Chair in consultation with the

Secretariat Director and the MC Chair Robert Branton (Fisheries and Oceans,

Canada). The Program Manager is responsible for coordination of the OBIS administration. This non-executive position includes the following tasks: 1) takes minutes of meetings; summarizes and tracks action points; 2) organizes meetings and manages the budget; 3) communicates with all components of OBIS (field projects, RONs, NRICs, CoML education and outreach; 4) coordinates OBIS activities; 5) assists OBIS network development, such as arranging MOU’s with data providers and other partners; 6) updates the web site so it is current in relation to partners’ and contributors’ information, with links to related activities

12 and organizations, OBIS related publications, etc.; 7) receives feedback from the

OBIS user community; 8) builds the OBIS user community; 9) maintains close

communication with the IC and MC Chairs; 10) ensures deadlines are met; 11)

communicates with each component of OBIS; 12) maintains files of key OBIS

correspondence, contact lists, and statistics; and 13) drafts contracts and progress

reports.

VI. Database Acquisition: Where Are We Going?

A. From quantity to quality

The quantity of data published through OBIS has surpassed expectations. Over the next two years the focus will be on the quality of the data and how representative it is of marine life. OBIS’ requirements for descriptions of datasets (i.e. metadata) and resolving errors with data will become more stringent. This will apply to existing as well as incoming datasets. Should some not meet the requirements they will no longer be published. The volume and breadth of OBIS data now requires a full-time

Programmer (Deepal Shah) supervised by the Portal Manager. This will result in a more formal quality asssurance protocol.

B. Filling geographic gaps

A gap analysis has shown that the deep ocean and the mid-ocean areas have the least data. This gap reflects the reality of past survey efforts, and is being addressed by several CoML field projects. The availability of more data with common features, such as habitats, animal movement tracks, or sampling methods, will enable

OBIS to develop new data search, visualization, and analysis tools. Thus, OBIS will gradually expand the list of attributes associated with species’ data to allow a greater variety of questions to be answered through OBIS. For example, where do individual sharks travel? What species occur on seamounts, kelp forests, seagrass beds, or coral

13 reefs? What benthic animals have been recorded where oil or gas exploration has been proposed?

C. Completing the census

OBIS still lacks data for some 150,000 of the estimated 200,000 described marine species. These data exist and various strategies to make it digitally available have been considered over the past six years. Data for the common and more abundant species are expected to be published through existing and forthcoming datasets. However, the increase in species names being published through OBIS needs to be reconciled with currently valid names. The Flanders Marine Institute found that 60% of species in three databases of North Sea benthos were unique to one of the databases, but after reconciliation only 20% were. These 20% were, as expected, genuinely rare species.

OBIS will continue to place high priority on publishing more species’ occurrence data from museums and other collections, fisheries and ecological surveys, and literature compilations. This is expected to increase rapidly the number of names published through OBIS but not necessarily the number of species. The OBIS IC has resolved that a more efficient way to acquire data on all marine species was by encouraging taxonomic experts to publish authoritative checklists of marine species with distribution data through OBIS. Typically, the “distribution” will be a type locality but as most species are rare, even a few localities may adequately represent the known distribution for many species. In this way, world checklists of turbellaria, pycnogonids, amphipods, digenea, nemerteans, sponges, and pelagic ostracods will be added to the world databases of fish, cephalopods, mammals, birds, and anemones, and mysids already published through OBIS.

14 There are many initiatives producing authoritative nomenclatures for marine species, notably the Catalogue of Life (Species 2000 + ITIS), which OBIS uses to validate names being published through OBIS. The OBIS Chair (M. Costello) has been working closely with Species 2000, ITIS, GBIF, and others to foster the completion of such nomenclatures for marine species. With IC members he has compiled a matrix of marine taxonomic groups by experts by estimated (or known) number of species in each taxon. Within the next two years OBIS will seek additional funding to fill gaps in world checklists of marine taxa so as to a) produce a checklist

(qualitative “census”) of all marine species, b) publish distribution data on all marine species through OBIS, and c) build a global community of marine taxonomic experts contributing data to OBIS and assisting use and quality assurance of data in OBIS.

The involvement of these experts will give OBIS the scientific authority it needs to be credible to funding agencies, and will make OBIS a prestigious place for scientists to publish data. For larger taxonomic groups, groups of experts will be facilitated, as is in progress for Crustacea, and is already the case for fish, seaweeds, and cephalopods. Once established, these groups are expected to be self-sustaining because of their prestige and influence on world science by being the most authoritative sources of species names and knowledge. For example, the Directors of museums in Europe have publicly resolved that contributing to online resources such as the European Register of Marine Species is a responsibility of their research staff.

The Census of Marine Life will include the diversity and abundance of species. During the next two years, OBIS will aim to provide the first checklist of marine species of the world, including distribution data. This will be the first census of what species live in the oceans. Modeling of species’ abundances by

15 biogeography, habitat, and empirical data can then build on this to provide the first estimate of the abundance of marine life by 2010.

VII. OBIS Portal Operation and Development

The OBIS Portal team, under the direction of the Secretariat Director, provides full time technical support for Portal Operation and Development. The major responsibilities include Data acquisition and Quality control, Portal operation, Portal development, Helpdesk support to OBIS users, OBIS data providers, and OBIS

RONs. OBIS has been built successfully on community support and will outsource some of its development tasks to biodiversity informatics centers around the world.

The detailed information on Portal operational responsibilities and procedures can be found in Appendix C. Here we focus on some major operations and technical development in the next two years.

A. Deliver a Higher Level of Interoperability: A Web Service-based Architecture

OBIS Schema and the interoperation software (DiGIR) have facilitated the phenomenal growth of OBIS data content to 9 million records in less than two years.

However, to represent all the data types that scientists have ever collected, including physical, chemical, and other disciplinary datasets in one single schema will inflate the schema to a level of complexity where interoperability becomes an intractable task. Meanwhile, OBIS providers, RONs, and many OBIS partners have developed

Web-based tools and data systems, which can either enhance OBIS content or the usability of its data. Clearly, a mechanism is needed to make these development efforts synergistic. Indeed, developers in Barcode of Life, OBIS-SEAMAP, San

Diego Supercomputer Center, to name just a few, have long discussed the possibility of using Web Service as an effective infrastructure to share data and tools. Here we propose to establish a Web Service based infrastructure within the OBIS community

16 and among OBIS partners so that, for example, a user comes to the OBIS Portal interested in a species can not only obtain its taxonomic and available geo-referenced information, but also easily obtain its DNA Barcode information from the BoLD system. The user will also be able to dynamically fetch tracking information from

OBIS-SEAMAP or find what other species can be found in a similar environment from the PAKT system developed at SDSC. Further information can also be drawn for her from Fishbase through the “Aqua Species” project. To implement this infrastructure we propose to approach it with the following steps.

Develop prototypical system and demonstrate interoperation on the Portal

for selected services among OBIS partners. The first participants include

BoLD, SDSC, OBIS-SEAMAP

Compile an inventory of ocean informatics tools that are widely used and

supported on the Internet. EUROBIS has expressed strong interest in

compiling such a master list with ICES and OBIS Portal will work closely

with EUROBIS to develop a global, comprehensive list

Develop Web Service standards for the marine component of an

Encyclopedia of Life

Establish a Web Service Registry for Ocean Informatics at Rutgers

University

B. Sustain a Finer Scale of Interoperability: Schema Extension

The OBIS Data Schema will be extended to interoperate fishery and molecular data. The Portal, under the guidance of OBIS TC, is responsible to make the necessary changes in its Portal software tools and documentations.

C. Enhance Usability (I): Quality Control by Experts

17 The Portal has developed a system to identify and report data errors to the original data providers. A prototype outlier identification program, which takes environmental information into account, has also been developed. With close to 10 million data points and over 50,000 taxonomic names to work on, more automatic tools are needed to assist the experts (the Editorial Board) to perform quality control.

A Web-based editing room will be built where comments from taxonomic experts can be gathered and converted into data cleaning logics automatically. Although data cleaning tools have been developed for various communities such as GBIF, we have yet to identify expert-oriented systems for use by OBIS. The Portal, the TC, and the

Editorial Board will work jointly to plan, design, and develop such a system.

D. Enhance Usability (II): Integration of Physical and Environmental Data Sets

The portal will integrate tools developed at the University of California San

Diego for integrating physical and biological datasets. Key capabilities will be to provide summaries of the physical environment different taxa are found in, and to search OBIS records based on characteristics of the physical environments (e.g.

"show me a list of fishes found in areas where the oxygen is less than 1 ppt"). Seed funding from the OBIS portal will leverage larger funding from a Gordon and Betty

Moore Foundation grant to do the work of customizing the existing prototype to OBIS needs and transferring it into the Java programming environment of the OBIS portal.

E. Enhance Usability (III): More Search Options to the OBIS User

OBIS has unveiled its newly designed Portal search interface with added search options including map search with zoom-in functions (based on Google Earth) and search by Exclusive Economic Zones. Search by IHO Oceans, Large Marine

Ecosystems, Longhurst Provinces, FAO Fishing grounds, Marine Protected Areas,

18 and other polygon-based areas are under development and will be provided to the user in May 2006.

F. Enhance Usability (IV): Full GIS Capability on the Portal

Although OBIS has been providing many spatial operations (mapping, overlays, spatial search) using C-Square Mapper, GeoTools, KGS Mapper, ACON

Mapper, etc., some of the spatial features such as track animations, user defined polygons, and complicated spatial searches can be best implemented in a more comprehensive GIS system. OBIS-SEAMAP at Duke University has carried out a detailed study to compare the ESRI and Map Server in system architecture, development time, and performance and scaling using SEAMAP data. Based on this report we will further enhance the Portal service with a Map Server based system.

G. Enhance operation capability

OBIS has acquired two state-of-the-art servers for Portal operation and

Rutgers Microcomputing Support, a professional computer operation group, has been contracted to maintain and operate the servers. With the rapid growth of OBIS data content, a storage system will be purchased for volume, redundancy, and performance in the next two years. Meanwhile, besides the mirrors at SDSC and OBIS Australia, we will also establish mirrors in Europe, India, and China. We will seek to further enhance our operation capability further by hiring a data manager to focus on data management, data cleaning, and helpdesk service.

VIII. OBIS Milestones

Objective Definition of approach Milestone When

Data acquisition Finding new datasets for 100 datasets April 2006 publication to provide as comprehensive taxonomic, geographic, and habitat coverage as possible All CoML projects 2007 publishing data through

19 OBIS

Finding new tools to One new mapping tool January Tools acquisition improve portal functionality (ACON) 2006 and efficiency Review of mapping March 2006 options incl. GIS Search data by EEZ April 2006 Search data by IHO April 2006 oceans and seas KGS Mapper upgrade April 2006 Search data by LME April 2006 areas Search data by FAO May 2006 areas Map centered on polar May 2006 regions Search data by ICES June 2006 areas Search data by Longhurst July 2006 regions Search data by MPA August 2006 Search by habitat at September dataset level 2006 Search by habitat at 2007 record level Track (line) data 2006 visualization Time series visualization 2008 (e.g. animation) Ability for sequential 2009 search (e.g. species to host or habitat to other species from that host or habitat)

Data publication Publishing data online 10 million records, June 2006 including adequate 60,000 species, metadata metadata to assist users to for all datasets search and interpret the data

Web pages and Web site should be user- New website design and April 2006 portal design friendly and intent clear to layout, including search, readers browse, results, and text pages Website aims clear February 2006 Search options clear and May 2006 intuitive OBIS user guide(s) May 2006 Links from species to May 2006 external information

20 sources Datasets content May 2006 described (new and expanded metadata)

Portal function Web statistics publicly April 2006 available Data access tracked per May 2006 dataset as an index of data use.

Data exploration Tools to select, map, model, Review online mapping March 2006 and visualization, and explore data, including tools and capture GIS, animations, sequential (download) searches, etc.

Data utilization Demonstrations and Publications using OBIS Mid-2006 applications of the data in data research, management and education Demonstrations of Late 2006 management application OBIS data access Early 2007 statistics being used as measures of individual and organization contributions to science OBIS contributing to Mid-2007 GOOS, IOOS and related ocean data systems

Quality assurance (a) Taxonomic Having authoritative, Improve informal browse April 2006 authority taxonomically controlled, hierarchy for higher taxa data management Add more marine species Late 2006 to CoL

(b) Data Checking datasets are Document and develop April 2006 integration quality complete and publish as QC procedures control anticipated

(c) Management Web site management April 2006 system system documented Expand Editorial Board May 2006 Peer-review system 2007 implemented

(d) Portal function Mirror site operational May 2006 Portal performance May 2006 metrics discussed and agreed Portal performance August metrics being monitored 2006

21 OBIS management Having effective Regional OBIS Nodes 2006 administrative and technical long-term host resources to develop OBIS arrangement Portal long-term host 2008 arrangement Portal mirror site(s) long- 2008 term host arrangement Editorial office 2008 (secretariat) long-term host arrangement