Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Coping with the technical and institutional changing context in cooperation development projects.
Franck Theeten

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-30 04:40 PM – 04:55 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-07

Abstract


Since 2008, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium is implementing the CABIN (Central Africa Biodiversity Information Network) project, with the support of the DGD (Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation) to facilitate the mobilisation of data from African researchers, reinforce their technical skills and provide a platform linking them to international scientific networks.

The publishing of biodiversity data is currently undergoing two simultaneous major changes that impact capacity-building projects in the field of biodiversity data. The first one is related to the evolution of the institutional context of cooperation, while the second one is related to the technical evolution of databases.  Because of the combined effects of the economic crisis and the technical maturity of the technologies used to mobilise content, fundraising centered on the digitization and publication of data has become a more and more competitive challenge.  The current trends in project proposals encourage the constitution of bigger international consortia dealing with the rationalization of workflows and the integration and reuse of already published data into on-line modeling tools. Simultaneously, the development of big data on the Internet has led to the development of a new generation of database systems. These systems focus on the high availability, and high processing speed through the direct use of clustered architecture.This landscape makes capacity-building projects in biodiversity data more challenging than ever, as a balance must be found between the development and maintenance of an infrastructure for local needs and acknowledging the global technological evolution.

This talk will present two activities carried out by CABIN in 2013 to address this challenge: a one month training session in Biodiversity Information in June 2013 and a call for data providers to publish data to GBIF by providing support in quality check, data cleaning and digtisation. It will also discuss strategies that could be applied to further develop existing projects and to raise the awareness of funders on this issue.