The NBN seeks to maximise use of biological data.

To do this, it is essential to understand user needs so that user-friendly data access systems and processes can be developed. Once collected, biological data should be available for multiple uses.

Despite this potential, biological data have not been applied as effectively as they might. Investment in biological recording over a long period of time, largely by volunteers and citizen scientists, has not been accompanied by a corresponding investment in data use.

This Working Group

This working group is being established to examine how to increase use of biological data, with an additional emphasis on ensuring the infrastructure is fit for efficient data use.

Group Focus

This group will focus on the following actions:

  • Develop strategy for tackling recording bias, search effort and certainty of ID. Promote value of negative records and increase negative record data holdings
  • Regularly assess data user needs and continuously improve the user interfaces of NBN products using forums and other mechanisms
  • Improve data interrogation and visualisation tools through workshops with user groups, user-centred design, and interactive collaborative events such as hackathons
  • Communicate regularly with data users and promote and demonstrate the many different example of how biological data can be used, applied and visualised
  • Develop an interconnected web between the NBN Trust family of projects and infrastructure
  • Develop a new NBN data access framework
  • Provide data interpretation, analysis and visualisation services to meet NBN user needs, including the adoption of existing open source data visualisation systems.