GFBio

German Federation for the Curation of Biological Data (GFBio)

The project is a joined cooperation of the key players providing environmentally related biological data and services in Germany. Environmental and biological research challenges related to the Earth’s ecosystems and climate dynamics is one of the global societal challenges. It runs in the second funding phase since 2015. The importance and the complexity of the problems to be solved demands increased collaboration and knowledge exchange. Biological data are currently distributed over many media in inconsistently formats. So it is not easy to share them. Therefore a coherent infrastructure to improve scientific data integration and preservation is indispensable.

Project Goals

The main goal of the GFBio project is the unification of the national data landscape of the biological research areas. A sustainable service oriented data infrastructure in the fields of biology and environmental sciences as basement for data intensive applications is going to develop. This research platform rests established storage infrastructures and procedures like PANGAEA for environmental data and integrates resources of the most important German natural sciences collections.

The common data infrastructure contains highly interdisciplinary heterogeneous data because of the very different needs of the users. The platform regards requirements of single researchers as well as those of natural sciences collections or big scientific networks. The application will be able to manage highly heterogeneous and interdisciplinary data. Particular attention will be given to genome, environmental, and ecological data and also to collections.

The Role of the GWDG

The GWDG cares especially for

• the portlet implementation for data management plans
• the data structure mapping for metadata exchange formats
• the APIs (application progamming interfaces) for terminology services and data transfer protocols.

Project Partners

GFBio is an interdisciplinary consortium. By the side of the GWDG well-known German scientific institutions are working on the project.

Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), Bremen coordinates the GFBio project.