pro-iBiosphere project

Pro-iBiosphere is a European Union FP7 funded project to develop an outline of a future European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System. The Pro-iBiosphere project has been launched on September 1, 2012 for the period of 2 years addressing technical and semantic interoperability issues and challenges that will ultimately lead to a more efficient system of the management of biodiversity information.

The aim of pro-iBiosphere is to prepare (= pro), through a coordination action, the ground for an integrative system (= sphere) for intelligent (= i) management of biodiversity (= bio) knowledge. Once it becomes operational, the European Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System will play a major role in facilitating the synthesis of core biodiversity data by creating an authoritative framework including, discovery of new species, naming of specimens and species, identification tools, descriptions, and various other basic types of information. It will also facilitate the acquisition of high quality biodiversity data from various sources, including legacy data; the curation of the data; and at the same time it will optimize the delivery of those data to the various users.

For practical reasons and to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed ideas, the test beds are primarily the production of floras and faunas produced at the partner’s institutions, how they can be linked to external datasets, and how the new information can be made more widely accessible.

Consortium partners are the Naturalis Leiden, the Royal Botanical Garden Kew, the National Botanic Garden Belgium, the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Sigma Orionis, Pensoft and Plazi.