International Living Atlases Workshop

Group photo from the International ALA Workshop

 

Summary

Since 2013, the community around the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has organized technical workshops to present ALA modules to other GBIF nodes, to help with its implementation, to improve already existing national data portals, and to share experiences and knowledge. Therefore, this project aims to continue helping new users, to continue assisting experienced users, by organising workshops, focused on specific modules of the platform (e.g. species module, spatial portal, etc.), training activities, sharing of doubts and ideas, solving technical issues, and to enhance the ALA GBIF network by exchanging experience from other projects and country nodes, and improving biodiversity data portals.

The expected outcomes are:

Short-term outcomes

  • Workshop with IT developers of GBIF Nodes (12-15 participants).
  • Launch of at least 3 new national data portals using ALA technology.
  • Improvement of current running data portals by upgrading tools.
  • Launch of spatial portals, region modules and/or species modules on the ALA running portals.
  • New technical documentation related with spatial, regions and species modules.
  • Improvements to the ALA documentation that is already on GitHub.
  • Creation of an official web page for the Living Atlases community as well as a specific mailing list for members to help for the internal communication.
  • Evaluation of the workshop by participants.

Long term outcomes

  • To have former participants from the workshop and previous workshops becoming new trainers for future ones.    
  • Increased number of users on the ALA GitHub and the ALA HipChat room.
  • Improvements made on the different national portals already running and with new functionalities.
  • Training courses each year.
  • To answer to European or International project calls to fund future workshops.

 

Objectives

  • To organize a five-days workshop around Atlas of Living Australia platform for advanced participants that already know the tool.
  • To organize a workshop during TDWG 2017 meeting for new participants.
  • To strengthen the Living Atlases community in the long term (governance, funding, etc.)
  • To improve the documentation and communication around the community.

 

News and Activities

The Workshop: Living Atlases workshop (CESP), was held in Madrid (Spain) from the 18th to the 23rd of February (2018). The workshop was funded for partners of the project, through the GBIF CESP Program. The event intended to bring together developers who are using Living Atlases tools, and developers who have an interest in using these tools for new projects. Among many objectives, were to install or improve collectory and biocache modules, to install or improve the spatial portal and BIE (species) modules and to discuss collaboration and contribution issues to future developments. For information regarding its agenda, technical information and more, please visit: https://www.gbif.es/en/talleres/taller-internacional-living-atlases/

On the 18th of February the coordinator of the Portuguese Node, Rui Figueira, gave a quick presentation about the Biodiversity Data Portal of Portugal. The idea was to share with other node’ developers and coordinators quick information about the current state of the database, as part of the agenda of the  Workshop: Living Atlases workshop (CESP), held in in Madrid, Spain.

 

Project Partners

GBIF Spain, GBIF Australia, GBIF Argentina, GBIF Benin, GBIF Brazil, GBIF Canadensys, GBIF Colombia, GBIF Germany, GBIF Luxembourg, GBIF Portugal, GBIF Sweden, GBIF United Kingdom

 

Duration
1 Jun 2017 - 1 Jun 2018

 

Funding
€ 10,000

 

Co-funding
€ 19,500

Programme
Capacity Enhancement Support Programme
 

Project identifier
CESP2017-0009

Project lead

GBIF France

Contact details

Anne-Sophie Archambeau, Project Coordinator

Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle

(MNHN) GBIF France

MNHN Géologie CP 48

43 rue Buffon

75005 Paris

France