OBIS: The database of the census of marine life project

OBIS was established by the Census of Marine Life program (www.coml.org). It is an evolving strategic alliance of people and organizations sharing a vision to make marine biogeographic data, from all over the world, freely available over the World Wide Web. It is not a project or program, and is not limited to data from CoML-related projects. Any organization, consortium, project or individual may contribute to OBIS. OBIS provides, on an 'open access' basis through the World Wide Web: taxonomically and geographically resolved data on marine life and the ocean environment; interoperability with similar databases; software tools for data exploration and analysis. OBIS was one of the earliest Associate Members of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org) which publishes data on all species. OBIS is a very active participant in GBIF activities, and one of the largest publishers of data to GBIF, reflecting its role as a specialist network for marine species. GBIF recommends that marine data are first published through OBIS, because OBIS can add special value (e.g. depth) and will manage the subsequent publication of data through GBIF. This also avoids duplication of data being separately published to GBIF and OBIS. All data obtained through field projects of Census of Marine Life are stored in OBIS. So far, OBIS has 19.1 million records of 106000 species from 643 databases. To utilize these data, OBIS provides tools that help using these huge data. For example, mapping of records of selected species can be done easily. This helps greatly for preparing national report of biodiversity for UN Convention of Biodiversity (CBD). Also these tools will be utilized by CBD itself for drafting Global Biodiversity Outlook. OBIS has central facility at Rutgers University in USA. In addition, however, OBIS has Regional OBIS Nodes (RON). Regional OBIS Nodes (RONs) are organizations that have committed to a continued support of OBIS within a geographic and/or national region using resources they have obtained. This will include serving data online and developing a data provider and end-user community. Some RON will provide tools, different language versions of the OBIS website, and/or provide mirror sites for the OBIS portal. OBIS itself was adopted as biological part of IODE in the IOC recently. In JAMSTEC, a new database was established recently as Biological Information System for Marine Life (BISMaL). It is important for Japanese community to develop this database with more information. We also expect this database will be Japanese RON of OBIS in the near future.