The National Biological Service supports sound management and conservation of our nation’s biological resources, working with others to provide the needed scientific understanding and technologies. Established in November 1993 through consolidation of the biological research, inventory and monitoring, and information transfer programs of seven Interior bureaus, NBS is committed to an “extroverted” approach. Several formal NBS partnerships with states and organizations such as The Nature Conservancy and the Association of Systematics Collections focus on the need to increase access and dissemination 0f biological data among scientists, decisionmakers, and the public.
A key element of the NBS program is development of a national partnership for sharing biological information: the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). The goal of NBII is to establish a distributed “federation” of biological data and information sources, relying on a network of partners and cooperators to make the data they generate and/or maintain available to others throughout this federation, using the Internet. The databases will remain with those responsible for the data. The “information superhighway” will interconnect participant data resources and make them widely available data to others.
New types of software tools will also be available over the NBII network, to help users at local work stations or personal computers draw on actual data from several different remote sources, or to work collaboratively with others at remote sites through the network (i.e., virtual laboratories). The NBII will also point to sources of biological science expertise, people and organizations that users can contact to get assistance in finding and understanding biological data.
The NBII will be implemented in three phases:
- The NBII Biological Data Directory (available on the Internet since March 1995) points users to biological databases and information sources, both within NBS and from other agencies or organizations.
- Through the NBII Clearinghouse, users will be able to search a distributed network of computers to see descriptive information (metadata) about various biological databases, and contact the source of a given database to acquire actual data that meet their needs.
- The Distributed System is the ultimate goal of the NBII. In this phase, users will be able to directly access, retrieve, and combine biological data from different sources at different locations (i.e., a virtual national biological database).
Examples of existing biological data sources to be included in the NBII are the National Wetlands Inventory database of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, biological data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), and data from state natural heritage inventories or state fish and game databases. NBS will also contribute its own biological databases, such as data in the GAP Analysis Program and the National Breeding Bird Survey.
Some of these data and information bases are already being served on the Internet. NBII’s contribution will be to direct more potential “customers” to these data, and to make it easier for people to compare or combine data from one database with another. In addition, NBS is working with institutions, such as natural history museums, herbaria, and libraries, to help include information in the NBII on their collections and holdings, much of which has been previously unavailable in electronic format.
NBII users will cover a wide spectrum, from scientific specialists to students and industry researchers to casual browsers on the Internet. The goal is to provide a variety of avenues through which people can access the network, see what is there, and get back what they want. Users will not have to be computer-skilled or even to have computers of their own.
Some information will be available via a toll-free phonecall, through the mail, or by fax. It can also be provided in hard copy form, on paper, CD-ROM, or diskette. NBII technical support specialists will be available to help users locate and retrieve the specific information they seek. Those who access NBII directly over the Internet may use standard search tools.
LTER’s commitment to data management and the maintenance of long-term datasets makes the program a natural fit with NBII. Researchers already have electronic access to information on different databases relating to a given ETER site or, in some cases, to databases on a given subject including several or most LTER sites. Most of the sites and the LTER Network Office have established or are establishing gopher and Web servers (see page 16) with descriptions of each site, its research history, and available datasets. The NBS looks forward to working with the LTER community in pursuing these common goals.
For more information: Explore the NBS Web home page (http://www.its.nbs.gov/nbs) or the NBII home page (http://its.nbs.gov/nbii), or contact: Trudy Harlow, Public Affairs, Director, NBS, 202-482-2996.