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The GBIF information system became operational in
early 2004, and currently 67 million records of primary biodiversity
data are being made available from over 400 databases by 111 data providers belonging
to 32 GBIF Participants. The GBIF Data Portal that integrates all these data
is accessed from all over the world, and it currently receives about a million
web hits per month. The GBIF Data Portal servers are currently located in a single place -- at the Secretariat in Denmark.
In order to achieve more stable availability of the Portal and higher efficiency through
parallel operation, GBIF has decided to establish mirror sites in other
continents. These sites will initially operate a copy of the GBIF
Data Portal, but will gradually increase their functions to cover
indexing of the regions' data provider content and to provide support.
An open call for proposals for establishing the mirror sites was made
in early 2005. Eight proposals were received from GBIF Participant
nodes and data providers. The main criteria for the selection were
geographic differentation and the level of resources that could be offered for this
project by these sites.
1. The European site will be at Botanic
Garden and Botanical Museum, Berlin-Dahlem, where the project is
led by Professor Dr. Walter G. Berendsohn. His group is one of
the strongest in the world in the field of biodiversity informatics and
has wide experience in standards and software development, it has been
leading the BioCASE project, and is the German Participant node of
GBIF. A strong support package from the German Ministry of Science
and the Freie Universität Berlin, including very fast internet
connections through the GÉANT
network contributed to their proposal. Due to its proximity
to the GBIF Secretariat, thus facilitating collaboration in establishing the mirror site,
all the mirroring mechanisms will be pioneered here starting May 2005.
2. The Asian site will be located at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) by a strong support from the Ministry of Science and Technolgy(MOST), where the project is led by Dr. Hyung-Seon (Howard) Park. KISTI is the Korean national gateway for science and technology information, providing a stable and powerful computing infrastructure that allows real-time inter-operational search and data sharing. KISTI also is responsible for the Korean node for GBIF. It is planned that it will become a GBIF mirror site starting in the second half of 2005.
3. The American site will be hosted by the National Biological
Information Infrastructure (NBII), the U.S. node for GBIF,
where the project will be led by Mr. Michael T. Frame. The United
States is currently the largest
contributor of GBIF data, sharing 26 million records from 29 data
providers. NBII covers thousands of information resources and has
lots of experience with GBIF tools and standards. The US site will be established last of the three.
It is foreseen that after these mirror sites are in operation, users
reaching out to the GBIF Data Portal will be automatically
forwarded to the closest or most available mirror site, such as
www.europe.gbif.net, www.asia.gbif.net or www.americas.gbif.net.
After an evaluation of the experience from these mirror sites, and
packaging of the technical solutions, other sites may be established
for regions and thematic areas with large numbers of GBIF data providers
and users.
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