Glossary

Definitions

• TFBIS Programme
  The Terrestrial Freshwater Biodiversity Information System Programme which is funded by the Government to help to achieve the goals of the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy through facilitating and funding data management systems and processes. It is administered by the Department of Conservation.
• TFBIS Contracts 214 & 239
  The contracts between TFBIS and Landcare Research to develop NZOR.
• Data Provider
  An individual or organisation who provides nomenclatural, taxonomic and biostatus data (and associated metadata) to NZOR.
• Steering Group
  The Stakeholder representation body responsible for the governance of NZOR.
• Provider Data
  Nomenclatural, taxonomic and biostatus data (and associated metadata) that are made available to NZOR by participating agencies. Any data generated by end user agencies and managed within the NZOR platform.
• NZOR Data
  Data generated within or by the NZOR platform (for example, consensus records, statistical analyses, and taxonomic management hierarchies).
• NZOR Platform
  The information systems which receives Provider Data and delivers NZOR.
• Metadata
  Documentation that describes the data and information.
• Creative Commons Data Use Agreement
  Aims to establish a fair middle way between extremes of copyright control and the uncontrolled uses of intellectual property. It provides a range of copyright licences, available to the public, which allow those owning or creating intellectual property – including organisations and individuals – to mark their work with the freedoms they want it to carry.

Related International Initiatives

• ITIS
  Integrated Taxonomic Information System
• EOL
  Encyclopedia of Life
• GBIF
  Global Biodiversity Information Facility
• CoL
  Catalogue of Life
• TDWG
  Taxonomic Databases Working Group, now known as Biodiversity Information Standards, an organisation focused on the development of standards for the exchange of biological/biodiversity data (www.tdwg.org).
• ALA
  The Atlas of Living Australia, The Atlas is an information system that aggregates data on all Australian species of flora and fauna and provides a capability to analyse the data geospatially.
• iNaturalist
  Citizen Science platform for NaturewatchNZ

Standards

• XML
  Extensible Markup Language a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup used for describing many different kinds of data. XML contains both the data and the description of the data.
• REST
  Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by the doctoral dissertation of Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification versions 1.0 and 1.1.
• URI
  A Uniform Resource Identifier consists of a string of characters used to identify or name a resource on the Internet. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network (typically the World Wide Web) using specific protocols. Computer scientists may classify a URI as a locator (URL), or a name (URN), or both. A Uniform Resource Name (URN) functions like a person's name, while a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) resembles that person's street-address. In other words: the URN defines an item's identity, while the URL provides a method for finding it.
• GUID
  A globally unique identifier is a special type of identifier used in software applications to provide a reference number which is unique in any context (hence, "globally"), for example, in defining the internal reference for a type of access point in a software application, or for creating unique keys in a database. While each generated GUID is not guaranteed to be unique, the total number of unique keys (2128 or 3.4×1038) is so large that the probability of the same number being generated twice is extremely small.
• TCS
  The Taxon Concept Schema was conceived to allow the representation of taxonomic concepts as defined in published taxonomic classifications, revisions and databases. As such, it specifies the structure for XML documents to be used for the transfer of defined concepts. Valid transfer documents may either explicitly detail the defining components of taxon concepts, transfer GUIDs referring to defined taxon concepts (if and when these are available) or a mixture of the two.
• IPT
  The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit is a software platform to facilitate the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the Internet, using the GBIF network.