About the Living Atlases Community

As GBIF nodes, one of our goals is to highlight our publishers and their data. To achieve this, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) developed a huge open source platform with several modules re-usable by other organizations. Since 2013, the community around this tool has organized technical workshops to present ALA modules to other institutions that wanted to implement it, to improve already existing national data portals and to learn from each other’s achievements.

In order to help new users but also to keep on assisting the experienced ones, we try to arrange at least one workshop per year around specific modules of the platform (e.g. species module, spatial portal, etc.). These meetings are really motivating for new users because they can actually realise that, with some developments, they will be able to have a powerful tool running. And at the same time, these training activities are also very productive for partners with ALA portals already running as they have the opportunity to share doubts and ideas, solve technical issues, get assistance from the ALA developers’ team and -in consequence - move forward on the developments of their national data portals. Furthermore, during these technical trainings, we get ideas from other projects and allow the nodes to keep on working significantly on their own.

Thanks to the previous meetings and other engagements arranged around this topic, at least 11 data portals using ALA technology have been released in production since 2014. Other are still under development (some of them are already listed on the new GBIF web page). Katia Cezón from GBIF Spain created a Carto map showing countries with ALA installation or interest in the ALA infrastructure.

On this website, you will find documentation and information about participants and the community but also ALA tools. You will be able to access the materials from past events but also news about future events and different ways to directly talk with members of the community (through HipChat or mailing list).

You will also be able to see the community in action because we are a group of developers that love to work together and improve tools to facilitate a free and open access to biodiversity data.