The National Biological Information Infrastructure: coming of age

Abstract

Coordinated by the US Geological Survey, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is a Webbased system that provides increased access to data and information on the nation's biological resources. The NBII can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. This article ± an individual case study and not a broad survey with extensive references to the literature ± addresses the structure of the NBII related to thematic sections, infrastructure sections and place-based sections, and other topics such as the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (one of our more innovative tools) and the development of our controlled vocabulary.

Integrated science for environmental decision-making: the challenge for biodiversity and ecosystem informatics

“…Established standards and a flexible controlled vocabulary enable effective and efficient exchange of information, facilitate the discovery of information, and significantly enhance information management. Several ongoing initiatives for enhancing resource cataloging and retrieval include the National Vegetation Classification standard, the NBII Vocabulary project (Cotter, Frame, Sepic, & Zolly, 2000), cataloging of Web resources via the Dublin Core standard for metadata, and the FGDC-compatible NBII Metadata standard (metadata are data about data; searchable, structured information about the content and character of a data collection). The latter is known as the NBII Biological Data Profile (Federal Geographic Data Committee, 1999).…”