Biodiversity Services and Clients

The aim of the Biodiversity Services Interest Group (BSCI) is to assess usefulness of existing biodiversity web service infrastructures from the perspective of integrating software applications such as workflow environments, discuss and agree upon common principles for API design, stability and documentation, encourage registration of useful Web services in a well-founded, well-known community directory i.e. BiodiversityCatalogue, produce documentation including background material, guidelines and best practices. The group will actively collaborate with projects and initiatives with similar aims (e.g. BioVeL, GFBio, LifeWatch, Kurator). Members will actively promote the findings in external conferences and workshops and encourage service developers to adopt agreed upon API principles and to document and advertise services in joint registry systems.

interest group
Image by Thomas Kvistholt

Conveners

Falko Glöckler
Head, Department Science Data Management & IT Infrastructure
Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung
Berlin, Germany

Anton Güntsch
Head, Research & Development Group Biodiversity Informatics
Freie Universität Berlin
Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
Berlin, Germany

James Macklin
Research Scientist
Botany and Biodiversity Informatics
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Core members

Name Affiliation
David Fichtmüller Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin (BGBM)
John Torgersen Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN)
James Macklin Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC)
David Shorthouse Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC)
Ben Norton North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS)
Ian Engelbrecht Natural Science Collections Facility (NSCF) South Africa
William Ulate Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG)
Nicky Nicolson Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew
Juan M Barrios Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO)
Wai-Yin Kwan Whirl-i-gig

Motivation

The aim of the Biodiversity Services and Clients Interest Group (BSCI) is to promote improved interoperability of biodiversity web services through common service API design principles, recognition of the needs of client systems, harmonized and machine-readable service documents, and a joint service registration system for promotion and discovery purposes as well as service monitoring. Over the last 15 years, the biodiversity informatics community underwent a fundamental technological shift from database-driven, human-readable web portals to service infrastructures for machine-to-machine communication. However, many of the new service layers have been designed in isolation and were not conceived as standardised and reliable functional units in a global biodiversity service-oriented infrastructure.

The Interest Group will continuously assess the biodiversity service infrastructure landscape and coordinate a harmonisation process for service APIs and their documentation. An important focus will be the analysis of criteria for service usability in integrating systems (e.g. workflow environments such as Kepler and Taverna), stability and versioning of service APIs, as well as semantic interoperability.

Becoming involved

The BSCI group is open to all interested parties. Members should actively participate in group discussions and be willing to apply results of the harmonisation process to analytical tool and data set services they may be providing to international infrastructures. Membership can be requested from the interest group conveners.

History and context

The conveners hosted a Biodiversity Services and Workflow Symposia at the TDWG annual conference in 2013 (Florence) and 2014 (Jönköping) and received a lot of interest from the participants. Both Symposia concluded that improved standardisation and documentation of biodiversity informatics services is urgently needed to avoid uncoordinated development of service APIs worldwide and to enable the development of a new generation of data-driven research platforms and workflows. The participants agreed that a concerted approach in the form of a TDWG interest group would carry forward the process effectively.

Resources

Products and outcome at github.com/tdwg/apis

TDWG Slack channel #developers

BSCI homepage, wiki, and document repository will be made available via the TDWG website.