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Building the Next-Generation Biological-Information Infrastructure.

John L. Schnase
Center for Botanical Informatics, LLC. St. Louis, MO
(Current address: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771)
Meredith A. Lane
The Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103
Geoffrey C. Bowker
Susan Leigh Star
Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
(Current address: Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503)
Abraham Silberschatz
Information Sciences Research Center, Lucent Technologies-Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974

A grand challenge for the 21st century is to harness the accumulating knowledge of Earth's biodiversity and the ecosystems that support it. To accomplish that, we must mobilize biological information—assemble it, organize it, and deliver it with dramatically increased capacity. We must elevate the global biological-information infrastructure to a new level of capability—a “next generation”—that will allow people to share on a worldwide basis the knowledge created by biodiversity and ecosystems research.

Recognizing the urgency of the task, the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, through its Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, recently coordinated a review of the US National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) (PCAST 1998). Over a 6-month period in 1997, people from a broad cross section of the public and private sectors contributed their insights, experiences, concerns, and hopes. What emerged was a renewed understanding of the importance of biological information to all aspects of human society. It became clear that much remains to be done to ensure that this information is complete and usable. Although the purpose of the review was to develop recommendations to build capacity in the United States, many of the panel's findings address global concerns of relevance to biodiversity research wherever it occurs. In this paper, we provide a summary of the panel's report, a view of what a next-generation