Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - 2:15 PM
283

BugML: allowing interoperability of data from distributed data sources

Timothy Pascoe, Canada Centre for Inland Waters, Environment Canada, Burlington, ON L7R 4A6, Canada

BugML is an XML standard being developed by Environment Canada to support the Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN), which is federally managed, but includes partners from a variety of sectors (provinces, NGOs, citizen science groups). CABIN employs the benthic invertebrate community as an indicator of ecological condition of freshwater ecosystems, using the Reference Condition Approach (RCA) as a method of site assessment. Currently, a suite of web-based tools (http://cabin.cciw.ca) provide on-line data entry and storage (biology, water chemistry and site characteristics), statistical analysis, and reporting. However, in order to achieve the quantities and scales of data coverage required for national reporting on aquatic ecosystem health, CABIN has moved to a ‘network of networks’ model. The development of BugML will allow the inclusion and interoperability of data from distributed data sources. Built using emerging standards for data integration such as GML, BugML will provide a clearly defined, uniform structure to allow data collected and stored in varying ways to be seamlessly integrated into the CABIN assessment framework.