This award will establish the National Bryophyte Information Service (NBIS), a distributed, Internet-based information service and testbed facility for the botanical research community. The mission of the NBIS is: (1) to provide immediate support for bryophyte collections data access that is urgently needed by several biodiversity projects and (2) to create a long-term, sustainable testbed for continuing research on biodiversity database and information system interoperability and scalability. This initiative is a multi-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration. Missouri Botanical Garden (www.mobot.org), the New York Botanical Garden (www.nybg.org) and the Bishop Museum (www.bishop.hawaii.org) will partner on research focussed on hybridizing Web and database technologies to improve access, interoperability, and scalability of biodiversity information systems. In order to provide simultaneous, integrated access to bryology research data in multiple systems we will design and implement a multidatabase federation. In addition, we will develop policies and mechanisms to support community curation of the databases and will deploy an individualized Web interface configuration service for researchers. The project will also participate in the Biological Collections Schema Library Project (www.bishop.hawaii.org/asc-cnc) and will, in part, utilize the Object Protocol Model database software from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These activities address an identified need to improve the social, access, and content scalability of biological databases. It also addresses one of the most important "Grand Challenge" problems facing bioinformatics, the problem of information- resource interoperability. We propose straightforward and effective solutions that can yield short-term benefits to the bryology community and, in the long term, complement and extend related theoretical and empirical bioinformatics research. This project is being jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the US Geological Survey Biological Resources Division as part of the development of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (www.nbs.gov/nbii).
