OBIS records for ocean sunfish, Mola mola, as at July 2018, visualised by the OBIS mapper (www

The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), formerly Ocean Biogeographic Information System, is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

in the

ocean The ocean (also the sea or the world ocean) is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of the surface of Earth and contains 97% of Earth's water. An ocean can also refer to any of the large bodies of water into which the wo ...

. It was developed as the information management component of the ten year

Census of Marine Life The Census of Marine Life was a 10-year, US $650 million scientific initiative, involving a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations, engaged to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. Th ...

(CoML) (2001-2010), but is not limited to CoML-derived data, and aims to provide an integrated view of all marine biodiversity data that may be made available to it on an open access basis by respective data custodians. According to its web site as at July 2018, OBIS "is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development." 8 specific objectives are listed in the OBIS site, of which the leading item is to "Provide heworld's largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format".OBIS website (visited 18 July 2018)
/ref>

History and current status

Initial ideas for OBIS were developed at a CoML meeting on benthic (bottom-dwelling) ocean life in October 1997. Recommendations from this workshop led to a web site (http://marine.rutgers.edu/OBIS) at Rutgers in 1998 to demonstrate the initial OBIS concept. An inaugural OBIS International Workshop was held on November 3–4, 1999 in Washington, DC, which led to scoping of the project and outreach to potential partners, with selected contributions published in a special issue of ''Oceanography'' magazine, within which OBIS founder Dr. J. F. Grassle articulated the vision of OBIS as "an on-line, worldwide atlas for accessing, modeling and mapping marine biological data in a multidimensional geographic context." In May 2000, US Government Agencies in the National Oceanographic Partnership Program together with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded eight research projects to initiate OBIS. In May 2001, the US

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

funded

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...

to develop a global portal for OBIS. Also in 2001, an OBIS International Committee was formed and its first meeting was held in August 2001. The production version of the OBIS Portal was launched at Rutgers University in 2002 as the web site http://www.iobis.org, serving 430,000 species-based georeferenced data records from 8 partner databases including fish records from FishBase, cephalopods from CephBase, corals from Biogeoinformatics of Hexacorals, mollusks from the Indo-Pacific Mollusc Database and more. By May 2006, the OBIS Portal was able to access 9.5 million records of 59,000 species from 112 databases, and by December 2010 (at the conclusion of the Census of Marine Life) provided access to 27.7 million records representing 167,000 taxon names.www.obis.org: archived version, 13 December 2010
/ref> As at July 2018, the OBIS website states that the system provides access to over 45 million observations of nearly 120,000 marine species (the reduced number of names cited being as a result of synonym resolution, i.e. reduction of taxa recorded under multiple names to a single accepted name), based on contributions from 500 institutions from 56 countries. In 2009 OBIS was adopted as a project by International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) programme of the

Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO. It first met in Paris at Unesco Headquarters from 19 to 27 October 1961. Initially, 40 States becam ...

(IOC) of

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

and in 2011, with the cessation of funding for the Rutgers-based secretariat and portal from the Sloan Foundation, an offer of hosting by the

Flanders Marine Institute The Flanders Marine Institute (Dutch: Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, VLIZ) provides a focal point for marine scientific research in Flanders, northern Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium ...

(VLIZ) in

Ostend Ostend ( nl, Oostende, ; french: link=no, Ostende ; german: link=no, Ostende ; vls, Ostende) is a coastal city and municipality, located in the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerk ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

was accepted to become the long term host for the system and also the OBIS secretariat moved from Rutgers University to the IOC Project Office for IODE in Ostend from where OBIS is presently maintained and additional development is carried out, without change of web address. OBIS is thus now located in Ostend, in the same building which is also home to VLIZ. VLIZ maintains two taxonomic databases, the

World Register of Marine Species The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a taxonomic database that aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms. Content The content of the registry is edited and maintained by scientific specialis ...

an
IRMNG
the

Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) is a taxonomic database which attempts to cover published genus names for all domains of life from 1758 in zoology (1753 in botany) up to the present, arranged in a single, internally c ...

, both of which feed into taxonomic decisions used to control the display of species-based information in OBIS and also provide the taxonomic hierarchy via which OBIS content can be navigated. OBIS is currently under the direction of IODE with advice from a steering group, the IODE Steering Group for OBIS (SG-OBIS); operational activities are directed by an OBIS Executive Committee (OBIS-EC) with support from 6 OBIS Task Teams. The OBIS secretariat, hosted at the UNESCO/IOC project office for IODE in Ostend (Belgium), includes the OBIS project manager and data manager and in addition to maintaining the OBIS system also provides training and technical assistance to its data providers, guides new data standards and technical developments, and encourages international cooperation to foster the group benefits of the network. Data available via OBIS cover all groups of organisms that have any association with marine or estuarine habitats, also including shorelines and the atmosphere above the ocean, such as marine

vertebrates Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () (chordates with backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, with c ...

(fishes, marine mammals, turtles, seabirds, etc.); marine

invertebrates Invertebrates are a paraphyletic group of animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''backbone'' or ''spine''), derived from the notochord. This is a grouping including all animals apart from the chordat ...

(including

zooplankton Zooplankton are the animal component of the planktonic community ("zoo" comes from the Greek word for ''animal''). Plankton are aquatic organisms that are unable to swim effectively against currents, and consequently drift or are carried along by ...

); marine

bacteria Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one Cell (biology), biological cell. They constitute a large domain (biology), domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometr ...

; and marine

plants Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclude ...

(e.g. phytoplankton, seaweeds, mangroves).

OBIS portal

As available web technologies have developed, th
OBIS Portal
has been through a number of iterations since its inception in 2002. Initially the system retrieved remote data in real time in response to a user query and used th
KGS Mapper
to visualize the results. In 2004, centralized metadata indexing and cacheing was introduced leading to faster and more reliable results, and th

was added to options for data visualization. In 2010, a full web GIS based system was introduced for the first time along with a new version of the web site which resulted in considerably more detailed and flexible presentation of search results along with a number of new search options. In April 2018, funding was announced to develop a new "2.0" version of OBIS with improved capabilities., and is released on 29 January 2019."OBIS 2.0 released"
The website URL changed from iobis.org to obis.org.

Regional OBIS nodes

Over the period 2004–present, an international network of Regional OBIS Nodes has also been established, that are facilitating the connection of data sources in their region to the master OBIS data network and also increasingly provide specialised services or views of OBIS data to users in their particular region.
Antarctic OBIS
:Hosted by Belgian Biodiversity Platform, Brussels and by

, Ostend. Managed by Bruno Danis
Argentina
:Hosted by Centro Nacional Patagonico - (CENPAT) - CONICET. Managed by Mirtha Lewis
Australia
:Hosted by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - Oceans and Atmosphere. Managed by Dave Watts
Canada
:Hosted by Centre of Marine Biodiversity and Bedford Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Bob Branton
China
:Hosted by Institute of Oceanology. Managed by Sun Xiaoxia
Europe
:Hosted by Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee. Managed by Ward Appeltans
Indian Ocean
:Hosted by National Chemical Laboratory and National Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Baba Ingole
Japan
:Hosted by National Institute for Environmental Studies. Managed by Junko Shimura
New Zealand / South West Pacific
:Hosted by National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research. Managed by Don Robertson
Sub-Saharan Africa
:Hosted by Southern African Data Centre for Oceanography. Managed by Marten Grundlingh
Philippines
:Hosted by ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity. Managed by Christian Elloran
Tropical and Subtropical Eastern South Pacific
:Hosted by University of Concepcion. Managed by Ruben Escribando
Tropical and Subtropical Western South Atlantic
:Hosted by University of Sao Paulo (USP) and Reference Center on Environmental Information (CRIA. Managed by Fabio Lang Da Silvera
United States of America
:Hosted by United States Geological Survey (USGS). Managed by Abby Benson.