Mary at Open Helix points to Dorothy at The Book of Trogool who says we should all take a look at Canadensys (hohoho). Dorothy says that Canadensys “is trying to collect biodiversity information from various researcher networks”. Canadensys says:
The mission of Canadensys is to unlock the specimen information held by Canadian university-based biological collections and share this via a network of distributed databases, compatible with other biodiversity information networks like CBIF and GBIF. In its initial phase, the network focuses on data of three of the most diverse, ecologically and economically important groups of organisms: plants, insects and fungi, the latter two representing some of the most poorly understood and inventoried organisms world-wide.
As Dorothy further points out, “their technical infrastructure is very much “use what you have; build only what you must”. Gosh, that sounds like a plan.
Big questions await intrepid database explorers. How are they dealing with agriculture? Might this become another gateway out of GBDBHell? Go ahead and rush in where I fear to tread.