19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Multi-disciplinary Use

WFCC-MIRCEN World Data Centre for Micro organisms (WDCM) meets Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)

Prof. Dr. Hideaki Sugawara (hsugawar@genes.nig.ac.jp)
WFCC-MIRCEN World Data Centre for Micro organisms, Japan

WDCM as the data center of World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) maintains on-line databases on 483 culture collections in 65 countries (as of May 20th, 2004). WDCM also maintains several microbial databases and mirrors valuable ones, e.g. Bacteria Nomenclature Up-to-date maintained by DSMZ in Germany. In the meantime, GBIF has expanded nodes in many countries and international organizations and WDCM is now the GBIF node for WFCC. As the node, WDCM provides the World Directory of culture collections and their holdings, a strain database of Basidiomycota studied by Japan Collection of Microorganisms and the DSMZ file in the GBIF scheme, namely, Darwin Core and DiGIR (Distributed Generic Information Retrieval) protocol.

In addition to microbial databases, WDCM tests linkage between the unified taxonomy of the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD: DDBJ, EMBL and GenBank) and databases of GBIF providers. The linkage is implemented as a workflow in the WDCM server based on DiGIR and a SOAP server developed by DDBJ, namely the SOAP server of TXSearch that is a search engine for the unified taxonomy. The linkage will promote taxonomy based on nucleotide sequences, that is de-fact standard in the case of bacteria. WDCM has recognized the need of a global index on GBIF data providers to make the linkage efficient.