The Atlas of Living Australia and Marine Biodiversity Data
Donald Hobern, CSIRO Entomology, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia
Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au Telephone +61 2 6246 4352
The Atlas of Living Australia1 (ALA) is a five-year project funded by the Australian
Government to “develop an authoritative, freely accessible, distributed and federated
biodiversity data management system that links Australia’s biological knowledge with
its scientific reference collections and other custodians of biological information”.
The project aims:
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To integrate data on specimens held by Australia’s natural history collections
and data from field observations of living organisms
To support the management and integration of biological data from all areas of
research (molecular to ecological)
To develop search interfaces and web services to facilitate discovery of
biological information resources and to support the use of biological data in
scientific research, policy-making and education
To ensure that data relating to Australian organisms is well-managed and
organised to meet future information requirements.
To meet these goals, the ALA is investing in the development of metadata
repositories, taxonomic name services, geospatial data indexes and online
identification tools for terrestrial, freshwater and marine biota. The Australian Faunal
Directory (AFD) and the Australian Plant Census/Australian Plant Names Index
(APC/APNI) will be the first taxonomic resources to be integrated for this purpose,
but the ALA needs taxonomic authorities for groups not currently included in these
lists, and aims to map data between these classifications and those served by other
taxonomic references (including state, national and international checklists).
The work of WoRMS is therefore of great relevance to the ALA. We see WoRMS as
an opportunity for the marine biodiversity informatics community to develop an
international framework for managing marine data. With WoRMS in place, marine
biodiversity data could well be better managed than terrestrial data. The ALA would
particularly encourage the WoRMS team to include mappings between WoRMS and
existing national and regional checklists and code lists. Such mappings will be
invaluable as a support for take-up and use of the Register.
A wide range of nomenclatural and taxonomic databases, including IPNI, Index
Fungorum, ZooBank, the Catalogue of Life, AFD, APC and APNI are actively
working to develop web services based on Life Science Identifiers and the TDWG
RDF vocabularies for taxon names and taxon concepts. Coordination of data
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The ALA is a partnership between CSIRO, the Australian Museum, Museum Victoria, Queensland
Museum, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Southern Cross University, the University of
Adelaide, the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and
Forestry and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
standards for marine taxonomic data with these projects will greatly simplify the
development of standard software and tools to share, consume and merge information
from all these resources.
The ALA will be keen to learn of new developments arising from the Marine
Taxonomic Editors’ Workshop, and will seek to work closely with all others with an
interest in this area.