National Biological Information Infrastructure Totally Explained

Everything about The National Biological Information Infrastructure totally explained

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is a program of the United States Geological Survey's Biological Informatics Office. Its purpose is to coordinate access to data and information on the biological resources of the United States, utilizing government agencies, academic institutions, non-government organizations, and private industry. The NBII does two things. First, it coordinates the research output of the biological community into information systems that are easily accessed, by providing organization and structure and funneling money. The structure is essentially invisible to the end user of the information, but is vitally important to the administrators and grant writers. The end-user aspect of the NBII is its Web portal which provides access to information, publications, and data from the various databases "in a seamless, unified portal.", which recommended that the United States Department of the Interior oversee the development of a National Biotic Resource Information System to coordinate information about biodiversity and ecosystems. The report found that such information was "vital to a wide range of scientific, educational, and government uses," but that, unfortunately, most of the information existed in forms that were not easily used. It envisioned a system of distributed databases designed to make the existing information more accessible. The report also suggested that new ways to collect and distribute data and information should be developed. It did mention networking, but not the Internet. .
   As a first step, in 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12906, intitled "Coordinating Geographic Data Acquisition and Access: the National Spatial Data Infrastructure". National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) deals with the acquisition, processing, storage, and distribution of geospatial (geographically referenced) data. In conjunction with this, but without a presidential order, Secretary Babbitt renamed the national biotic resource information system as the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). In 1996 the OMB OMB Circular A-130, the document which control the management of federal information resources in the United States, was amended to include the NBII.
   Things didn't move as quickly as the scientific community would have liked, and in 1998, the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report "Teaming With Life: Investing in Science to Understand and Use America's Living Capital" which urged that current information technology be applied to the management of science information, and reiterated the findings of the 1993 report. In 2001 money was finally appropriated for the development of the system of NBII network nodes.
   In implementing this node-based system, the USGS is designing each node to focus on a narrowly defined scope (often geographic) or purpose. For example, the Southwest Information Node focuses on desert ecosytems.

International Initiatives

The NBII is involved with four international initiatives:

"FishBase for the Americas: Improving Access to Western Hemisphere Fisheries" is a partnership of FishBase, the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) and the NBII Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (FAR) Node.
"Pollinators Thematic Network: A Network for Pollinator Information and Expertise in the Western Hemisphere (PTN)" which is primarily an Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network initiative.
"Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network"
"Invasive Species Information Network for the Americas"

Reviews

Early on researchers found the NBII coordination less than expected. The NBII navigation buttons on the Invasive Species databases had confusing topic labels especially when compared with the National Agricultural Library labels. ." The switching back and forth between the portal and the databases was "a tedious exercise indeed.", the "Fire Research And Management Exchange System" portal to U.S.-based Internet resources on forest and wildland fires. Other problems include lists of resources that are hidden well down on the page, so that they don’t appear on the screen, and there are the occasional dead links. "

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