Dave Martin, systems architect at Australia’s national science agency – commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation (CSIRO) – is currently seconded to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and is helping the National Biodiversity Network build the ‘NBN Atlas Scotland’.
The ‘NBN Atlas Scotland’, which is currently live in a beta version, is being tested, developed and further improved ready for a full public launch in the spring of 2017. Dave is working on this with the help of two software developer colleagues from the ‘Atlas of Living Australia’. The Scottish atlas uses free open source technologies and components of the ‘Atlas of Living Australia’ (ALA) but differs from its Australian counterpart in that it uses the UK species inventory as its backbone taxonomy.
“It’s good to see the software being used” says Dave. “I’m excited that through this software, we are building a global community of developers and projects and, of course, this means that all projects will benefit from language translations, bug-fixes, documentation and new tools that are developed on this platform”.
“It’s possible to use the single platform and build portals with multiple faces” explains Dave. “So the ‘NBN Atlas Scotland’ has the potential to expand into separate atlases for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the whole UK – using just one system with shared infrastructure and shared costs”.
The benefits will be enormous. Using the same platform will make it easier to share biodiversity data globally. Already the GBIF nodes for Spain and France are on board with their own biodiversity atlases and GBIF Argentina is in the process of developing one which will be released later this year. Projects from Brazil, Costa Rica, Belgium and Portugal are also in the early stages of adopting ALA components for their own portals. If all the world’s biodiversity data is shared on the same software platform, sharing the information will be simple.
So take a look at the beta version of the ‘NBN Atlas Scotland’ at: www.als.scot and please give your comments and feedback to info@als.scot