almost 9 years ago

Meet the repo: European Data Portal

Those of you creating entries for the 2017 #Ebbe have a burgeoning abundance of public repositories to choose from. But if you come from outside the biodiversity or bioinformatics domain, you might find yourself wondering what you should be looking for. We'll try to share a few examples in coming days to help you refine your entries.

Do note that the Challenge is looking for your insights. In many cases, your understanding of some of these repositories will exceed our own—they're increasing at a rapid rate, and GBIF's historic focus has been and remains on working with institutional data holders through our distributed network. It's our hope that you help us understand what options and alternatives might be available for taking findable, accessible open data and improving its interoperability and reuse by

It might be helpful at this point to re-emphasize the information that's most interesting and relevant to GBIF users—namely, species data, particularly the form of checklists or occurrence datasets. Both are described here, but in essence, checklists provide a rapid catalogue or inventory of species (and other taxa) within a specific taxonomic, geographic, and thematic context. Meanwhile, occurrence datasets compile evidence (an observation, a specimen, etc.) that a species or other taxon was recorded at a particular place on a specified date.

So, checklists give us a list of organisms related by names, place or some other status; occurrences tell us more about where and when organisms were recorded. For those who want to test yourselves, our network of Participants and partners is increasingly interested in tapping into richer quantitative data from ecology fieldwork, which structures recorded occurrences into consistent 'sampling events' compiled over time across sites, transects and inventories.

But to put a finer point on things, let's get started with our first repo!

EDP: European Data Portal

As one might guess, the European Data Portal or EDP, 'harvests the metadata of Public Sector Information available on public data portals across European countries.' Users and browsers can search structured metadata drawn from various countries accross Europe to access datasets of interest to them.

The terminology that the data providers use isn't always likely to match the GBIF vernacular, but searching the EDP for 'species checklist' turns up some useful examples

There seem to be some likely candidates for repurposing here, like:

It's probably no surprise to find a familiar advocate of open biodiversity data—the Flemish research NGO (and GBIF publisher, partner and champion) INBO, known in English as the Research Institute for Nature and Forest. Each of the following datasets, while available through the EDP, are also already shared through GBIF.org:

Red list of dragonflies in Flanders, Belgium: EDP | GBIF.org
True Fruit Flies (Diptera, Tephritidae) of the Afrotropical Region: EDP | GBIF.org
Invasive Alien Species in Belgium - HARMONIA database: EDP | GBIF.org

These examples only skim the surface. What do you think?

More to follow soon…as our Danish hosts say,
'Med venlig hilsen' (with the friendly greeting),

Kyle