Newman P1
1Atlas Of Living Australia, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Peggy Newman is the Data Manager at the Atlas of Living Australia and Node Manager for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, leading a team of data engineers and analysts who transfer, ingest, process, and index datasets from hundreds of data providers. She's been involved with several national and international projects to develop and operationalise data standards.
Abstract:
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA, ala.org.au) delivers biodiversity data to and from a variety of government, research and citizen science agencies to support science, policy and decision-making.
The ALA is the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, gbif.org), and the success and ongoing growth of both platforms is based on the ubiquitous nature of the Darwin Core data standard which defines relatively simple species occurrence records by the vocabularies and formats needed to mobilise them.
With the onset of lower cost, higher throughput biodiversity monitoring techniques such as camera traps, eDNA and acoustic monitoring the sector increasingly demands more complex information be packaged with species data. Provenance tracking must be recorded across field, laboratory and algorithmic protocols to reliably establish both whether a species was detected and what the capability of it being detected was.
Darwin Core is developed and maintained by the independent Biodiversity Information Standards community (TDWG for Taxonomic Databases Working Groups, tdwg.org). The global and national challenge at hand is to adapt the data standards to the new use cases, followed by the infrastructure, tools and informatics community.
Work began several years ago on this journey, culminating in the recent public review of the new Darwin Core Conceptual Model and an accompanying Frictionless Data (frictionlessdata.io) implementation of the model called the Darwin Core Data Package. These new artefacts offer long awaited capabilities for delivering complex data but many challenges for the ALA’s infrastructure and data delivery.
