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In case you are wondering... What is GloBI?, Why GloBI?, Who makes GloBI possible?, How does GloBI work?, How to share data through GloBI?, GloBI in the wild, How to use GloBI as an educational tool?, How to cite GloBI?, Who cited GloBI? and Who partners with GloBI?
<h3 id="what">What is GloBI?</h3>
<p>Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) provides <a href="http://opendefinition.org/ossd/" title="open service definition">open access</a> to finding species interaction data (e.g., predator-prey, pollinator-plant, pathogen-host, parasite-host) by combining existing <a href="http://opendefinition.org/od/" title="open data definition">open datasets</a> using <a href="https://opensource.org/osd" title="open source definition">open source</a> software.
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Like videos? Then you might like this <a href="http://vimeo.com/89373303">2 minute GloBI
introduction video</a>.</p>
<h3 id="why">Why GloBI?</h3>
<p><i>
“The various books and journals of ornithology and entomology are like a row of beehives containing an immense amount of valuable honey, which has been stored up in separate cells by the bees that made it. The advantage, and at the same time the difficulty, of ecological work is that it attempts to provide conceptions which can link up into some complete scheme the colossal store of facts about natural history which has accumulated up to date in this rather haphazard manner. This applies with particular force to facts about the food habits of animals. Until more organised information about the subject is available, it is only possible to give a few instances of some of the more clearcut niches which happen to have been worked out.”</i> — <a href="https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/7236467">Charles Elton, 1927. <em>Animal Ecology</em>. pp 65-66. </a></p>
<p><i>“Biodiversity researchers have focused on diversity at the cost of ignoring the networks of interactions between organisms that characterize ecosystems.”</i> — <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/446029a">Kevin McCann, 2007</a></p>
<p><i>“An essential element of a truly inclusionary and democratic approach to science is to share data through
publicly accessible data sets.”</i> — <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu169">Soranno et al., 2014</a>
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<p><i>“As scientific data users, we take the standpoint that scientific data are not copyrightable and, furthermore, they can be accessed, shared and reused freely. Thus, once legal access has been gained to copyrighted publications, the data within those scholarly publications can be considered to be open data that is freely extractable. This set of recommendations has been reached specifically for scientific use and societal benefits.”</i> — <a href="https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.9.e115466">Benichou et al., 2023</a></p>
<p>Now that folks have mapped the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project">human genome</a>, put
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong">a man on the moon</a>, isn't it time to provide easy
access to how, when and where organisms interact with each other so that we can better understand and better
preserve our ecosystems? Perhaps GloBI can become the <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a>
of ecology: a global map that shows how organisms rely on each other . . . </p>
<p>By providing an infrastructure to capture and share interaction data, individual biologists can focus on
gathering new interaction data and analyzing existing datasets without having to spend resources on (re-)
building a cyberinfrastructure to do so.
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<h3 id="who">Who makes GloBI possible?</h3>
<p>GloBI is made possible by a community of software engineers, bioinformaticists and biologists. Software engineers
such as <a href="http://linkedin.com/in/jhpoelen">Jorrit Poelen</a>, <a href="https://github.com/coding46">Göran
Bodenschatz</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/reiz">Robert Reiz</a> collaborate with bioinformaticists
like <a href="http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/chris-mungall/">Chris Mungall</a>, data managers like <a href="http://github.com/millerse">Sarah E. Miller</a> and biologists like <a
href="http://ccs.tamucc.edu/people/dr-james-d-simons/">Jim Simons</a>, <a
href="http://ronininstitute.org/research-scholars/anne-thessen/">Anne Thessen</a>, <a href="https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9943-2342">Jen Hammock</a> and <a
href="https://sites.google.com/view/brianhayden/home">Brian Hayden</a> to capture, provide access to and use interaction data
that is provided by <a href="/references.html">biologists and community scientists around the world</a>. <b>GloBI is sustained by an intricate network of thriving open source, open data and open science communities</b> in addition to receiving donations, grants, awards or being written into grants, including, but not limited to, EOL's <a href="http://eol.org/info/485">EOL Rubenstein Fellows Program</a> (CRDF EOL-33066-13/F33066, 2013) and the David M. Rubenstein Grant (FOCX-14-60988-1, 2014), and the Smithsonian Institution (SI) (T15CC10297-002, 2016). If you would like to contribute to GloBI please visit our <a href="contribute" target="_blank">contribute</a> page. </p>
<h3 id="process">How does GloBI work?</h3>
<p>GloBI continuously scans existing data infrastructures and registries and tracks the species interactions data they make available. Found species interaction data are then resolved and integrated. So, rather than being a giant centralized repository of species interaction data, GloBI is more of a search index that helps to find existing species interaction datasets in their native cyber-habitat. For more information about how GloBI works, please visit the <a href="/process">Data Integration Process</a> page.</p>
<h3 id="share">How to share data through GloBI?</h3>
<p>GloBI exists because of people like yourself who share their interaction data, or refer to existing datasets that
are not yet <a href="references">included in GloBI</a>. Do you have some interaction data you'd like to access through GloBI? Please read <a href="contribute">this</a>.
<h3 id="education">How to use GloBI as an educational tool?</h3>
<p>Partner collaborators at the <a href="https://eol.org">Encyclopedia of Life</a> have <a href="https://eol.org/docs/discover/food-webs">developed tools</a> to better understand food webs in specific and ecosystems in general. Also, Daniela Baron <em>et al.</em> created an <a href="http://danielabar.github.io/globi-proto/">Interactive Ecosystem Explorer</a> for high school students. In addition, many other educational resources exist including, but not limited to, <a href="http://hhmi.org">hhmi</a>'s <a href="https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/exploring-trophic-cascades">Trophic Cascades</a> and <a href="https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/earthviewer">Earth Viewer</a>. Ideally, GloBI will help facilitate to create, and improve, these openly accessible educational resources.</p>
<h3 id="cite">How to cite GloBI?</h3>
<p><b>GloBI is made possible by researchers, collections, projects and institutions openly sharing their datasets. When using this data, please make sure to attribute these original data contributors, including citing the specific datasets in derivative work.</b> Each species interaction record indexed by GloBI contains a reference and dataset citation. If you have ideas on how to make it easier to cite original datasets, please <a href="/contribute#join-a-discussion">open/join a discussion</a>.</p>
<p>To credit GloBI for more easily finding interaction data, please use to following citation to reference GloBI:</p><p>Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open
infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. <em>Ecological Informatics</em>. <a
href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.005">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2014.08.005</a>.</p> <p>In addition, if you'd like to visually reference GloBI, please don't hesitate to use the <a href="https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/logo" target="_blank">GloBI logo collection</a> created by <a href="http://pepperluboff.wordpress.com" target="_blank">Pepper Luboff</a>.