The i4Life Project (Indexing for Life) is to create a Virtual Research Community that will develop and harmonise the various species catalogues used by six of the world’s global biodiversity programmes using the Catalogue of Life as a yardstick. One of the great issues in biodiversity science is how to synthesize a comprehensive view of the entire biodiversity to better understand how it functions, and to model and forecast how it will respond to major anthropogenic pressures. Harmonising the differing catalogues of species is a crucial part of this synthesis and has enormous practical significance in indexing the knowledge needed to protect biodiversity. Six ‘global biodiversity programmes’, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the European Nucleotide Archive (part of INSDC), the Barcode of Life initiatives, the IUCN Red List, the new LifeWatch programme, and the Encyclopedia of Life, join in this project with the Catalogue of Life to initiate this harmonisation and to explore the full extent of species surveyed in the different programmes. The target is to enable each programme to enhance its catalogue with the assistance of the others, and to create a harmonised list for the entire set of organisms. ... [Information of the supplier]
Biodiversity information constitutes an important source of knowledge for many disciplines. For example, it is fundamental to supporting conservation and for understanding the potential impacts of climate change. External and internal factors call for an urgent modernization of the production and accessibility of these data, information and knowledge. These external factors include the need for biodiversity data to support decisions for regional and taxon focused conservation. Internal factors are a consequence of the opportunities of the digital revolution, and the need to reconcile the escalating volume of data with the requirement to curate it by a fixed number of taxonomists. The pro-iBiosphere project has been launched for a period of two years (September 1st, 2012 to August 31st, 2014), with the goal of addressing technical and semantic interoperability challenges and preparing the ground for the creation of a system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge which will improve the present system of taxonomic literature. ... [Information of the supplier]
Welcome to SYNTHESYS: the European Union-funded Integrated Infrastructure Initiative grant. This five year project which began in February 2004, comprises 20 European natural history museums and botanic gardens, aims to create an integrated European infrastructure for researchers in the natural sciences. SYNTHESYS is split into two activities: Access and Networking Activities. ... [Information of the supplier]
ViBRANT is a European Union FP7 funded project starting in December 2010 that will support the development of virtual research communities involved in biodiversity science. Our goal is to provide a more integrated and effective framework for those managing biodiversity data on the Web. ViBRANT provides: (1) A virtual research environment (Scratchpads) where users can safely store, share and manage their research information; (2) Analytical services for users to build identification keys and phylogenetic trees; (3) A publication platform for users to automatically compile biodiversity science manuscripts from their research database; (4) A portal for users to centrally access publicly accessible biodiversity research information and literature; (5) Training, helping research communities to use these tools and services; (6) A standards compliant technical architecture that can be sustained by biodiversity research community. ... [Information of the supplier]
