Tag Archives: NBII

NBII To Be Taken Offline Permanently January 15, 2012

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“In recent years, how­ever, the NBII–like so many other impor­tant fed­eral programs–was plagued with bud­get cuts. The FY 2012 bud­get man­dated its ter­mi­na­tion. The main Web site, www.nbii.gov, will be taken offline on Jan­u­ary 15, 2012, along with all of its asso­ci­ated node sites.

The NBII pro­vided three main ben­e­fits to the bio­log­i­cal resource com­mu­nity. First, its design as a fed­er­a­tion of part­ners allowed it to assist data own­ers in main­tain­ing crit­i­cal assets that might not oth­er­wise be made broadly avail­able; sec­ond, sci­en­tists, man­agers, and oth­ers search­ing for data on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject could do so from a sin­gle, Web-based source rather than hav­ing to go to the sites of numer­ous orga­ni­za­tions to com­pile the results they sought; and third, the NBII pro­vided users with direct access to many data resources that are deeply embed­ded in struc­tured data­bases on the Web and that are rel­e­vant to biology–resources that would not be revealed to them using a stan­dard search engine such as Google.

USGS staff now are work­ing with part­ners to iden­tify ways that–to the extent possible–will help to fill the gap in data access that will be cre­ated when the NBII goes offline.”

To read more about the National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture, here’s a link from which the above quote was taken:

http://www.usgs.gov/core_science_systems/Access/p1111-1.html

A Post­script:

“The Library of Con­gress is a part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive web archive project to archive U.S. Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Web­sites, and this site has been crawled by the Inter­net Archive as a part of that project. It is not pub­licly acces­si­ble yet but it has been preserved.

 

Since we’re a part of the col­lab­o­ra­tive project, we’ll even­tu­ally get a copy of that cap­ture for the Library of Con­gress archives.”

 

/mrc (Mar­garet Clifton, )

 

Image Search comes to Science.gov

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“Science.gov intro­duces Image Search link — 21 Dec 2010

Science.gov, a gate­way to gov­ern­ment sci­ence infor­ma­tion pro­vided by US Gov­ern­ment sci­ence agen­cies, has intro­duced an Image Search link under Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to enable users to quickly find sci­ence images, includ­ing ani­mal and plant, weather and space, and earth and sun images and more. The infor­ma­tion is free and no reg­is­tra­tion is required.

To begin with, three data­bases are being searched from one search box. These include: The National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture (NBII) Library of Images from the Envi­ron­ment (LIFE), The National Aero­nau­tics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion (NASA) Image eXchange (NIX) and The National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion Photo Library. More image data­bases will be added in the com­ing months.

In addi­tion to the image search, Science.gov has under­gone sig­nif­i­cant soft­ware upgrade for quicker per­for­mance. It has included both the Fed­eral Reg­is­ter and Code of Fed­eral Reg­u­la­tions in the basic search and also pro­vides an author clus­ter on the results page. The alerts ser­vice has also been upgraded so that users can man­age their Science.gov alerts directly from their alerts email and get daily alerts rather than weekly.

Science.gov is hosted by the Depart­ment of Energy Office of Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion, within the Office of Sci­ence, and is sup­ported by CENDI, an inter­a­gency work­ing group of senior sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion man­agers. Cur­rently in its fifth gen­er­a­tion, Science.gov pro­vides a search of over 42 sci­en­tific data­bases and 200 mil­lion pages of sci­ence infor­ma­tion with just one query.”
Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, 12/21/10

NBII — National Biological Information Infrastructure — new look, more functional searching

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“The National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­ture (NBII) has updated its search engine to search mul­ti­ple data­bases at the same time, and now also returns clus­tered results. You can try it at NBII.gov. ”

Source: Research­Buzz, 9/3/09

From “About” NBII :

The NBII Pro­gram is man­aged by the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Survey’s Bio­log­i­cal Infor­mat­ics Office, and “is a broad, col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­gram to pro­vide increased access to data and infor­ma­tion on the nation’s bio­log­i­cal resources. The NBII links diverse, high-quality bio­log­i­cal data­bases, infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, and ana­lyt­i­cal tools main­tained by NBII part­ners and other con­trib­u­tors in gov­ern­ment agen­cies, aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, non-government orga­ni­za­tions, and pri­vate indus­try. NBII part­ners and col­lab­o­ra­tors also work on new stan­dards, tools, and tech­nolo­gies that make it eas­ier to find, inte­grate, and apply bio­log­i­cal resources infor­ma­tion. Resource man­agers, sci­en­tists, edu­ca­tors, and the gen­eral pub­lic use the NBII to answer a wide range of ques­tions related to the man­age­ment, use, or con­ser­va­tion of this nation’s bio­log­i­cal resources.”

U.S. Geological Survey adopting Vivisimo to improve NBII search platform

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The U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey has cho­sen Vivisimo, a provider of enter­prise search soft­ware and exper­tise, to pro­vide its web­site users data and infor­ma­tion from a num­ber of bio­log­i­cal data sources. Vivisimo Veloc­ity Search Plat­form will replace the USGS’ National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infrastructure’s (NBII) search solu­tion and pro­vide a sin­gle search inter­face. NBII is a col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­gram to pro­vide increased access to data and infor­ma­tion on bio­log­i­cal resources. The pro­gram works with var­i­ous fed­eral, state, non-profit, and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions. The Veloc­ity imple­men­ta­tion will ini­tially search 30 data sources across mul­ti­ple agen­cies and uni­ver­si­ties. Veloc­ity will also enable geospa­tial dis­play of search results – allow­ing users to search for cer­tain plants or ani­mals in a spe­cific region or loca­tion. USGS will also incor­po­rate Velocity’s new con­cep­tual search to take advan­tage of its exten­sive and author­i­ta­tive Bio­com­plex­ity The­saurus.

Source: E-Content Mag­a­zine (ECX­tra) April 17, 2009.