The Biofinity Project: Providing Next-generation Tools for Biodiversity Research

OCAMPO, F. C.; MALDONADO, B.; ALVAREZ BOHLE, M. C.

Wood Hole, MA, USA

Congreso; TDWG Annual Conference; 2010

Marine Biological Laboratory

@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } The Biofinity Project (http://biofinity.unl.edu) is a free web-based repository for biodiversity data and tools designed to support research in the biological sciences. The Biofinity Project federates biodiversity information and genomics and provides support for inclusion of external data regardless of format. The repository allows scientists and, to certain level, the public) to access, analyze, share, and publish on biological data from a myriad of available resources. Tools provided by The Biofinity Project, such as mobile iPhone data-integration and geo-tagging, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for specimen identification and verification, and web applications for niche modeling, BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool). The Biofinity Project unifies genomics and biodiversity data, thereby empowering investigation of patterns that can lead to a greater understanding of broad-scale, widely applicable, and emergent biological properties. The Biofinity Project provides full access to enormous, publicly available biodiversity data at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and genomics data at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).  In addition, it provides upload and unification of independent databases that are in different formats and based on different software programs. Searching, browsing, and uploading of data to an external database is possible via a web browser or a mobile interface such as the iPhone or iPod Touch. The Biofinity Project features My Labs an integrated application that permits  collection of data, classify results, and map located specimens. My Labs is a unique feature of The Biofinity Project that provides online hosting of biological systems databases and tools for collaborative research across multiples users and/or institutions. Using My Labs, users can easily enter, manipulate, publish, map, integrate, and process their data in an easy-to-use, secure web environment. This system features integrated Google Maps for geo-coded specimen distribution mapping, and data can be shared via KML export. We show-case our on-going research on scarab beetle biodiversity that uses Biofinity and more specifically My Labs