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The Indian Ocean Biodiversity System (IndOBIS) is the Regional OBIS Node of the International OBIS for the Indian Ocean. The major objectives of IndOBIS are as follows:
- Collection, Collation and Dissemination of spatially and taxonomically resolved marine species distribution records from the Indian Ocean region.
- Maintenance of voucher specimens from the Indian Ocean.
- Develop data products on spatial distribution patterns of marine organisms viz. bioregionalization, regime shifts, Alien species etc.
- Develop partnership amongst countries bordering the Indian Ocean and to create distributed network of marine species database linked with IndOBIS.
- Develop spatial data modelling tools to assess marine biodiversity changes in the Indian Ocean region.
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A web-based data entry page has been designed and standardized with 28 required fields pertaining to the OBIS schema, to record and maintain the details of voucher specimens. You require login credentials to access the data entry form, which can be obtained by contacting the Data Manager. Once you submit your data through web entry form, a unique voucherID will be generated which you need to label on your physical sample and submit it to the Referral centre, CMLRE.
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After submitting voucher specimen from the web entry page, a unique ID will be generated automatically, to represent that specimen/physical sample, and this is called a voucherID.
Once generated, you are required to label your specimen with the corresponding voucherID and submit it to the Referral Centre, CMLRE as early as possible.
Following verification of the physical samples by the Officer-in-Charge, Referral Centre, the data will be validated and made available to online.
Thus, the voucherID can be used to represent specimens in your publications.
NOTE*:The Generated voucherID is not valid until the physical specimen is submitted to the Referral Centre, CMLRE.
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IndOBIS has an IPT installation, the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit, which is a free and open source web application which makes it easy to share three types of biodiversity-related information: primary taxon occurrence data, taxon checklists and general metadata about data sources. It is designed for interoperability using open standards such as the Darwin Core and the Ecological Metadata language. OBIS only harvests metadata and data from the node's IPT. More information on the IPT toolkit can be found here.
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IndOBIS follows the OBIS schema, which currently has eight required DwC terms: occurrenceID, eventDate, decimalLongitude, decimalLatitude, scientificName, scientificNameID, occurrenceStatus, basisOfRecord. The old OBIS schema was an OBIS extension to Darwin Core 1.2., which was based on Simple Darwin Core, a subset of Darwin Core which does not allow any structure beyond rows and columns. It added some terms which were important for OBIS, but were not supported by Darwin Core at the time (e.g. start and end date and start and end latitude and longitude, depth range, lifestage and terms for abundance, biomass and sample size). A list of all possible Darwin Core terms can be found here.
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Data submitted to IndOBIS go through a series of quality control procedures before being made available online. An in-depth quality control of each record on two levels (taxonomy and geography) improves the quality of both the individual data source and of the integrated database, since all inconsistencies or doubts are communicated with the data provider. This not only provides a strong added value for the data custodian, but also for the user: being able to access and use high-quality data controlled on different levels can lead to more reliable analyses. A complete overview of the followed quality control (QC) procedures can be found here.
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Yes, to submit your data through IPT toolkit you require an account, which can be obtained through the Data Manager. Alternatively, data can also be submitted through email.
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All of the data available through IndOBIS are uploaded into OBIS and searchable there as well. OBIS is the parent node of IndOBIS and OBIS in its turn transfers its data to GBIF.
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OBIS is the parent node of IndOBIS. By default, all data available in IndOBIS are uploaded into OBIS. OBIS data in its turn is uploaded to GBIF. These three information systems are interlinked through a specific dataflow.