The Atlas of Living Australia: History, current state and future directions.

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is Australia's national biodiversity database, delivering data and related services to more than 80,000 Australian and international users annually. Established under the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy to provide trusted biodiversity data to support the research sector, its utility now extends to government, higher education, non-government organisations and community groups. These partners provide data to the ALA and leverage its data and related services.

A story of data won, data lost and data re-found: the realities of ecological data preservation.

This paper discusses the process of retrieval and updating legacy data to allow on-line discovery and delivery. There are many pitfalls of institutional and non-institutional ecological data conservation over the long term. Interruptions to custodianship, old media, lost knowledge and the continuous evolution of species names makes resurrection of old data challenging.

Herbarium data: Global biodiversity and societal botanical needs for novel research.

Building on centuries of research based on herbarium specimens gathered through time and around the globe, a new era of discovery, synthesis, and prediction using digitized collections data has begun. This paper provides an overview of how aggregated, open access botanical and associated biological, environmental, and ecological data sets, from genes to the ecosystem, can be used to document the impacts of global change on communities, organisms, and society; predict future impacts; and help to drive the remediation of change. Advocacy for botanical collections and their expansion is needed, including ongoing digitization and online publishing.

A specialist's audit of aggregated occurrence records: An 'aggregator's' perspective.

A recent ZooKeys' paper (Mesibov, 2013: http://www.pensoft.net/journal_home_page.

A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities.

Biodiversity informatics plays a central enabling role in the research community's efforts to address scientific conservation and sustainability issues. Great strides have been made in the past decade establishing a framework for sharing data, where taxonomy and systematics has been perceived as the most prominent discipline involved. To some extent this is inevitable, given the use of species names as the pivot around which information is organised.