Information Infrastructure

1. Distributed Infrastructure

TaiBIF utilizes the TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval) protocol to exchange distributed data and integrate data in its information architecture in order to share data with the GBIF community. Since some of the species occurrence data in Taiwan are in Chinese language, the TaiBIF team took advantages of TAPIR’s customization feature and developed XML file extensions so that these data can be shared in the original Darwin Core architecture; a search platform was also established. The team continues to assist biodiversity-related institutions in deploying TAPIR. The accumulated species occurrence data in various agencies and museums so far have reached 1.5 million.

2. Development of Software Tools

After years of research and development effort, the TaiBIF team has made available many Web service tools to accelerate the integration and sharing of biodiversity data. For example, there are tools to check scientific names and geographical coordinates:

A. The scientific names are matched against TaiBNET and Sp2000; any errors in spelling are highlighted and reported back to the users for reference. Additional information on the taxon level, author, and publication year of the species are provided in the correct sequence so that users can easily standardize the format and increase the accuracy of data.

B. TaiBIF converts geographical coordinates to the format commonly used in Taiwan so that users can update old ecological distribution data and conduct further analysis and research work. TaiBIF also verifies the coordinates. Its tools check spatial data for errors; e.g. based on the description of a location and latitude and longitude, the tools can determine if the coordinates fall outside the location range. TaiBIF will pass the information back to the users (data providers) to make necessary changes. Consequently, the quality of species occurrence data is improved and the goal of integrating and accessing biodiversity data through geographical information is accomplished.

(Last modified in April 2012)