MULTINATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
IOBIS/OBIS-AUSTRALIA
OBIS Australia is the Regional OBIS Node (RON) for the Australian region. It is a partnership between the National Oceans Office (Department of the Environment and Heritage) and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (CMAR). OBIS Australia seeks to facilitate the flow of marine species distribution data held by agencies and individual researchers in the Australian region into the OBIS international data network. It does this through a combination of physical hosting of relevant datasets on the OBIS Australia server, and assisting other agencies around Australia to serve data directly from their own systems via the DiGIR protocol. The international OBIS system is governed by an International Committee (IC) of invited experts and a Management Committee (MC) including representation from each of the regional nodes and the international OBIS Portal and Secretariat. The operation of the Australian node is autonomous, but guided by directions from the OBIS MC as well as the Australian Census of Marine Life (CoML) National Committee. OBIS Australia hosts marine species datasets from CMAR and the Bureau of Rural Sciences (BRS) in Australia, and has provided assistance to data providers in the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), and 6 museums around Australia (via the OZCAM network) to make selected databases interoperable with the OBIS system. It also hosts and maintains the reference installation of the web accessible "c-squares mapper" that is useful for visualizing OBIS and other distribution data on a range of user-selectable base maps. [Summary provided by OBIS Australia]