W05 - Developing a mechanism to coordinate planning and investment in biodiversity informatics

Unsolicited contributions considered? No

Abstract

There has been significant progress in organizing digital information on the world’s biodiversity to support scientific research, policy decisions and public engagement. This has been achieved using funding from many agencies, institutions and foundations and has delivered functional infrastructures at global, national and other scales. However, most funding has been on a short-term basis and aligned with local priorities and project-based delivery plans. It has proven difficult to achieve sustainable growth and to align efforts as part of an interconnected global infrastructure programme. This has led both to duplication of effort and overlapping mandates and to slow progress in addressing even well-understood requirements.

This workshop at will report on outcomes of a workshop GBIF is organizing in mid-2018 and will consider next steps. The GBIF workshop will bring together a wide range of relevant stakeholders to develop and propose a model for how the international community could prepare and implement shared roadmaps for delivering biodiversity informatics infrastructure. The goal is to achieve the following outcomes:

1. Enable interested parties anywhere in the world to contribute to a transparent planning and prioritization process.
2. Deliver community-approved roadmaps for delivering interoperable repositories, networks and services to support digital biodiversity science at all scales.
3. Support development of architectural plans for components within these roadmaps.
4. Document and promote best practices and agreed standards for compliant data systems.
5. Contribute guidance and coordination for development of project proposals to deliver missing components (with the goal of supporting appropriate parties in securing funds for their own projects to contribute to the overall roadmap).

The GBIF workshop will develop a proposal for how such a coordination mechanism could work and how it could be funded and maintained. The workshop will also include working sessions to draft exemplar implementation roadmaps for two high-level components identified in the 2012 Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook document (GBIO, http://biodiversityinformatics.org/):

• Integrated occurrence data – aligning activities around the world to aggregate spatial evidence of species occurrence, removing duplication of effort, and ensuring delivery of the most comprehensive integrated data resource possible. This is a pragmatic choice since several key infrastructures are already exploring such alignment.
• Biodiversity knowledge network – developing models, social networks, reputation and recognition systems to empower and reward professionals and knowledgeable amateurs to contribute to the curation and improvement of digital biodiversity information. This component involves mostly sociological integration and change and will bring together skills from a different set of contributors. These sessions at TDWG 2018 will report on these discussions and consider next steps.