We are working with our partner agencies including federal, state, and non-government agencies and organizations to see what we collectively can do with the collections and museums to help put those institutions in a position where their data are more accessible, more interoperable, and more applicable for resource management decisions. Directories of biodiversity or biological science experts can also be another really valuable information product if you think about federating them and making them accessible for different people to use and access. The Taxonomic Resources and Expertise Directory is one example. Basically, we have created an online directory of taxonomic specialists for North America that includes information on their areas of taxonomic and geographic specialty and that is available for people to find and use as a resource. We now have about 1,000 different specialists listed there.
Experts can both enter and update their data online that way.
Analysis Tools . Another important part of the NBII content is tools for biological analysis. The idea here is that we want to be in a position not just to let people find data and information more easily but also to find and share analytical tools such as ecological models or GIS applications. These are tools that people can use to get to the point at which they are actually answering a question or producing a result. We can use the federation to share the tools just as you can use the federation to share the data.