14 March 2012: The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has reported on progress made on including genomic-level information in its free and open access biodiversity databases, which are available online.

A GBIF press release describes progress toward achieving GBIF’s goal of including genomic-level data in its biodiversity databases, information that will improve the integration of different types of data on organisms and their environments. A GBIF-workshop held in Oxford, UK, gathered experts from Europe, the US, China and Japan, who completed the mapping and alignment of three genomic informatics standards using adaptions of the Darwin Core (DwC) standard.

A future testing programme will integrate data from diverse repositories of genomic information into the GBIF network, linking organisms with their environmental context. These developments contribute to fulfilling a key objective of the GBIF’s Strategic Plan 2012-16, namely to accommodate the vast amount of new data on the world’s biodiversity, which is increasingly reported as genomic information.

GBIF was established by governments in 2001 to facilitate the unification, mobilization, access, discovery and use of information on the biodiversity of organisms over time periods and across the planet. [GBIF Press Release]