W12 - Standards for Interoperability for Bio-logging Data

Unsolicited contributions considered? Yes

Abstract

Bio-logging provides valuable insight into animal movement, behaviour, physiology in the context of the surrounding environment. It includes technologies like GPS, accelerometers, video and acoustic recorders to document location, velocity, altitude, depth, heart rate, internal/external temperature, eye movements, tail swishes, and migration, foraging or breeding activity.

Bio-logging data are not just the measurements collected from on-animal sensors but also the information describing the animal and the deployment of the sensor. The data may include the capture and release of the animal, the configuration of the sensor and the retrieval of the data, and any proprietary processing or decoding of raw sensor data.

A workshop on data standardization at the 6th International Bio-logging Science Symposium in September 2017 determined that there is a call from domain experts, manufacturers and data managers to establish an agreed set of data standards for bio-logging data. The current lack of standards hinders the community’s ability to document, archive and share data and increases the chance of errors in data management, interpretation and analysis. Although sensors differ in design and purpose, most scientifically relevant information can be described using a finite set of variables along with metadata about the sensor, animal, and deployment. In the bio-logging world there are many databases and repositories set up with varying purposes and funding arrangements, targeting specific taxa, geography, habitat or functionality. With this scenario unlikely to change, the need to exchange data between them is becoming more apparent. The intention of this workshop is to investigate the practical and technical challenges of interoperability between different systems that host animal movement data sourced from bio-loggers. The workshop will have two components. Firstly, participants are invited to give a short talk to share their experiences with applying an existing standard such as Darwin Core to animal movement, that is, time, location and species information. The main activity for the workshop will be a technical exercise to explore different existing or proposed standards to extract and combine datasets from several open bio-logging repositories and collectively explore the pros and cons of those standards. Domain specialists, data experts and biodiversity gurus are all most welcome.