Wednesday, August 20, 2008

openModeller being used by the GBIF data portal

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) recently released a new version of its data portal allowing users to generate niche models in real time. After searching for occurrence records, users have the option to create a niche model when visualizing results.

The data portal uses a Java client that can communicate with a remote modelling service through the openModeller Web Service protocol (OMWS). The Java client was developed by the University of Colorado, and the modelling service by CRIA. Initially, models are being generated only for present time using the Envelope Score algorithm.

GBIF is the world largest biodiversty data portal, currently serving more than 140 million specimen/observation records of which 80% are georeferrenced.