Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a collaborative, digital, open infrastructure that pulls together Australian biodiversity data from multiple sources, making it accessible and reusable. The ALA helps to create a more detailed picture of Australia’s biodiversity for scientists, policy makers, environmental planners and land managers, industry and the general public, and enables them to work more efficiently. The ALA is the Australian node and a full voting member of GBIF – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.
The ALA and GBIF facilitate data mobilisation via use of the Darwin Core standard, which defines a glossary of terms primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information.
Darwin Core is maintained by the Darwin Core Maintenance Interest Group in the Biodiversity Information Standards organisation (TDWG – formerly known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group).
Additionally GBIF also maintain a series of vocabularies for data harmonisation during ingestion. GBIF vocabularies are described and linked from this page.
Information on this page was provided by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), and is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0.
Last reviewed: October 2024