[Taxacom] New GGBN Data Portal released today!

[Dröge, Gabriele]

Dear colleagues,


We are happy to announce that the new GGBN Platform and Data Portal, including new requirements, features, and corporate design, has been launched today at http://www.ggbn.org.  The portal allows GGBN member institutions to publish information on their tissue and DNA holdings through a shared data portal.  Based on the DNA Bank Network's data portal, the new GGBN infrastructure has been extended to support DarwinCore-Archive in addition to ABCD. To do so GGBN has created the GGBN Data Standard (http://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/GGBN_Data_Standard) that can now be used as extensions with DarwinCore-Archive and ABCD).  This new infrastructure, and its associated testing over the past year, has resulted in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to increase its GGBN online collections from 8K samples in February 2015 to more than 27K samples. As a result of this and other tests of the DarwinCore-Archive, ABCD and GGBN Data Standard, the DNA Bank Network is now fully merged with GGBN. The virtual platform of GGBN is hosted and maintained by the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Freie Universität Berlin. This work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as well as SYNTHESYS. Further information about the GGBN infrastructure can be found at http://wiki.ggbn.org/ggbn/Data_Architecture.
New features of the data portal include:

*        user settings to subscribe to search results, including download options,

*        search and order DNA and tissue samples across all online GGBN partner collections, see http://data.ggbn.org/ggbn_portal/search/index

*        find statistics on all 12 of the 40 GGBN member collections currently online, see http://data.ggbn.org/ggbn_portal/stats/index

*        see records of certain taxa in other biodiversity portals and loaning details, e.g. http://www.ggbn.org/ggbn_portal/search/record?unitID=AB4OE14&collectioncode=Fishes&institutioncode=USNM

*        implementation of the latest GGBN Data Standard for tissues and DNA, see http://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/GGBN_Data_Standard (this standard will be submitted to the Biodiversity Information Standards Working Group in January with the goal of being ratified as an official TDWG standard) and

*        integration of the GBIF checklist bank web service as well as the Prokaryotic Nomenclature up-to-date web service (PNU) to feed the GGBN taxonomic backbone.





The updated website also includes information about i) current GGBN members (http://data.ggbn.org/ggbn_portal/members/index), including contact information for each repository; ii) GGBN membership, including GGBN's governance model (http://wiki.ggbn.org/ggbn/Governance) and draft terms of reference (http://wiki.ggbn.org/ggbn/Terms_of_reference), to be reviewed by the GGBN General Assembly in June 2016, during our 2nd GGBN Conference, and iii) a GGBN 2016 Conference information and registration page: https://meetings.ggbn.org/conference/ggbn/2016/index.



Mailing List

Finally, GGBN will share news and important information via the webpage and via its new mailing list.  To post a message to all list members, e-mails can be sent to ggbn-info at lists.fu.berlin.de<mailto:ggbn-info at lists.fu.berlin.de>. To subscribe or unsubscribe to the GGBN mailing list, please go to https://lists.fu-berlin.de/listinfo/ggbn-info.



For updated contact information on GGBN, please visit our website: http://wiki.ggbn.org/ggbn/Contact_Us.

Guidance on making tissue and DNA collections discoverable through the GGBN data portal, in addition to our online technical requirements, will follow in 2016, in addition to a prototype for the GGBN document library.



Big thanks to the informatics teams of BGBM, Smithsonian and GBIF for their support and assistance.



With Kind Regards,



Katie Barker, Gabi Droege, and Ole Seberg


Katharine Barker
Program Manager, Global Genome Initiative and Global Genome Biodiversity Network
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
MRC 106, PO Box 37012
Washington DC 20013-7012
Tel: 202-286-1390