Enhancing the Access and Publication of Biodiversity Data in Central Africa: The CABIN Technical Infrastructure

Since 2008, the Royal Museum of Central Africa has maintained CABIN (Central African Biodiversity Information Network) with the support of the Belgian Directorate General for Development Cooperation. CABIN promotes the ease of access to biodiversity data published on the Internet for researchers from Central Africa, as well as the publication of data from local datasets to networks such as GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). In March 2009, a milestone was reached at the CEDESURK ( Centre de Documentation de l Enseignement Superieur Universitaire et de la Recherche de Kinshasa ), where the first part of the required technical infrastructure for accessing and publishing data was implemented. In order to facilitate the maintenance of this infrastructure as well as the integration of local biologists and IT scientists into existing scientific networks and communities, tools and software were developed within the framework of existing projects and well-known standards such as ABCD and DarwinCore. This poster gives an overview of the technical architecture of the installed components: 1) For accessing data, a biodiversity portal based on the BIOCASe portal (Biological Collection Access Service for Europe) has been installed at the CEDESURK facilities, with the help of the Eb@le project, which supports the Internet backbone of academic institutions from the Congo Democratic Republic (see : http://cabin.ebale.cd). This application features an enriched and multilingual query interface that can be customized with presentation templates. The integration of the portal into the CEDESURK infrastructure was made with support from the BGBM (Botanischer Garten und Botanische Museum) which developed it. 2) The BioCASe Provider Software was installed to publish data; the integrated QueryTool is being used as an interface for the local scientists, again after having customized the original presentation templates in order to better visualize multimedia content. In 2010, CABIN will issue a call for local researchers who might be interested in publishing their data on the Internet through this platform. The project will also provide support and training for maintenance of the infrastructure by local institutions. These two tools, developed by the BGBM, enable separate functional components to query data providers independently from the presentation templates. The CABIN project illustrates that this distinction allows the installation of the same application in different institutions and technical contexts while facilitating the sharing of common data and metadata among different projects.