Meeting GBIF’s targets for access to data records will need a thorough investigation of the feasibility of mobilising primary biodiversity data from multimedia resources such as images, photographs, audio and videos. The GBIF Multimedia Resources Task Group (MRTG) is currently taking on this challenge.
Objectives:
The MRTG will provide recommendations on the following issues:
- Criteria for a Multimedia Data Sharing Infrastructure (MDSI)
- Best practices guide for multimedia data management and data exchange/sharing
- An estimation of the scale of multimedia resources in biodiversity
- Metadata schema(s) for multimedia data and standards/protocols for exchange/sharing
- Whether existing provider services such as DiGIR or TAPIR will need to be altered, or a new tool developed, to handle these data types
- Identification of potential data providers and suggested ways to encourage their participation through the GBIF network
- Involvement of industry leaders
- Uses of GPS enabled mobile devices and other recording tools.
Progress/Outcome:
The GBIF MRTG exercise began during March 2008. Given the geographical spread of the MRTG, most of the business was conducted through email, wiki and teleconferences. The Group commissioned a survey in early May 2008 and submitted its first report to the GBIF Secretariat in September 2008 (click here for report). In September 2008 an initial version of the Multimedia Resources Metadata Schema was drafted and revised according to suggestions from the Science Committee and discussions in a joint GBIF-TDWG Task Group on Multimedia Resources, constituted in December 2008. The GBIF MRTG submitted its second report in March 2009 (click here for report) and will submit the updated schema for ratification by the TDWG in the near future.
The GBIF Science Committee is reviewing the recommendations, one of which is to include the MRTG schema in the next version of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit to discover, describe and mobilise multimedia resources in biodiversity. The GBIF Secretariat is planning annotation tools to tag metadata for public repository-based multimedia resources (e.g. Flickr, YouTube) and index them through the GBIF network.
