Open Access Data Sharing for Borneo’s Ecological Data

Case Study: Open Access Data Sharing for Borneo’s Ecological Data

Case Summary

Borneo is the third largest island in the word with 50% of the land are covered by forests. Borneo also known for its biodiversity with 15,000 plant species, 1400 amphibians, mammals, and reptiles [1]. However, these data cannot be accessed because lack of awareness of open access data sharing. The data only can be accesses by internal users as it is only available at institutional and government. Public users such as researcher and ecologist need to collect the data even though the data is actually exist and cause researchers waste of time, resources and money. Here, this study proposed an open access data  sharing portal called BorEco and only using the Borneo’s ecology data that been collected by the researcher or ecologist. The researchers or ecologist can submit their dataset and also can re-use other researcher’s data.  Thus, this portal provides opportunity to discover and inspect the available dataset so that new important finding can be explore further. User also do not need to integrate multiple dataset form multiple sites manually as the portal are provide this features.

 Introduction

In the 21st century, ecology data is evolving rapidly across the time and there has been growing awareness for open access data sharing for ecologists and researchers across worldwide.  The ecology data have wide range from the attributes of environment such as temperature to the physical environment (example: soils, water). This data can be transformed to useful information and knowledgeable for researchers to use for combined efforts such as analysing meta-data by data mining technique.

A worldwide survey made by James A. Mills et al. shows that 73 principal investigators with long-term studies have positive attitudes towards sharing data and 93% of principal investigators are positive towards historically shared data [2].  The benefits of open access data sharing is it can be a platform for researchers to re-use ecological data, sharing data form multiple sources and saving time, resources and money since there is no need to collect data multiple times.    Besides that, the researcher may gain trust from the public as their findings can be verified [3].

 This study will focused on the ecology data of Borneo rainforests specifically the soil types, and plant species. Borneo is the third largest island and covered with dense rainforests. Borneo Island is divided between Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia and estimated have 15000 species of plants and 6 major soil types are discovered since 1994. [1] From this information, we can see that Borneo have diverse and large volume of data that can be re-use for other purposes.  However, open access data sharing still not a common practice in Malaysia. It may be due to various reasons. First, the researchers and ecologist only focused to their research and secondly, they believe there barriers in data sharing [4]. This phenomenon could affect the researcher, ecologist and society form many sides. First, collecting data multiple times may involve huge cost and time consuming for the researchers. Secondly, this will be an obstacle for innovation and new findings. Moreover, this phenomenon can widening the gap between the developed and developing countries. [3]

Thus, this study will provide approaches for managing and bringing ecological data specifically the plant species and soil types together to consolidate the dataset across of Borneo, developing a standard for open access data and build a portal for ecological data.  Here, this case study proposed a one stop centre or portal for ecologists and researches to share and re-use existing data.

Problem Statement  

Ecological data can describes the relationship among the plants, animals and their physical environment such as types of soils. Borneo has enormous of ecological data that have been collected over many decades by the researchers and ecologists. The data usually are stored independently in an intuitional or government in wide range of different data storage management system. The system are usually available offline and accessible by internal users only. There are no standard to combine these data collection together in a single tool or system that researchers can explore and visualize the relationships between different types of data at the same site  and accessible online. The society also are demanding for information from the ecologists to forecasting the deforestation activities.