• Home
• Search
• Register
• Login
• Forgot Password
• Help

• News
• Supporters
• FAQ
• Contribute
• About Us

Frequently Asked Questions

These are some of the more commonly asked questions about BCI.

We already have a list of collections that works well for our domain. Why do we need a global one? How will BCI relate to the index of collections that I use at the moment?

Lists of collections for different taxonomic groups or geographic regions already exist. Notable examples include Index Herbariorum (IH), Insect and Spider Collections of the World (ISCW) and the BioCASE metadata database. There are also newer projects that are building databases of collections such as Biorepositories.org database for vouchers of molecular data and the CollectionsWeb project for natural history collections in the United States.

• These lists overlap in their coverage. A European botanical collection may appear in BioCASE and in Index Herbariorum for example.

• The codens or abbreviations issued by these collections (if any) don't have a global scope. There is nothing to prevent 'collisions' between them.

• The new generation of large scale biodiversity informatics projects (such as GBIF, EoL and the Atlas of Living Australia) require an integrated set of identifiers that are resolvable to standard metadata for collections.

• Users require a single place to go to search the metadata for all collections.

BCI is a bridging application that wraps these extant lists, fills any gaps and provides services to the new, cross disciplinary projects. It will use economies of scale to provide a single set of web services that cover everything — empowering existing curation efforts rather than attempting to replace them.

BCI already reflects the data held in IH, ISCW and Biorepositories.org in its interface. BCI is taking on responsibility for managing the BioCASE CORM dataset and hopes to collaborate in many other projects as the curator of collections metadata. If you curate lists of collections and sub-collections we would like to hear from you via the admin@BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org.

How does BCI relate to the NCD Toolkit produced by ETI?

ETI BioInformatics in Amsterdam have created a toolkit to help larger organisations and regional portals curate lists of collections inline with the NCD exchange standard. BCI and ETI plan to implement a synchronisation mechanism that will allow data to move between installations of the toolkit and BCI once the toolkit is deployed.

What is the legal status of data held in BCI?

Everything in the BCI (apart from the personal contact details of contributors) is freely distributable under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. This is important not only to encourage contributions to the database but also to ensure that the data can be as widely used as possible.

How will BCI persist beyond its initial funding?

The services associated with BCI require continued support from contributing organisations to persist but the data will be available in perpetuity even if funding ceases. This is achieved by periodically releasing curatorial snap shots of the complete data set and depositing them in appropriate archives. This is one of the reasons all data must be covered by a uniform, open license.

Is there only one copy of BCI?

There is only one master copy of the data but people are encouraged to keep local mirror copies if they are needed for database lookup. If network latency problems become an issue formal mirror sites may be established on different continents.

What web services are available to access BCI data?

One of BCI's primary functions is to provide machine access to its data. It therefore supports as many web service APIs as possible. Read more on the web services page.