About Greg Whitbread
Architect and manager
of the Integrated Botanical Information System (IBIS) at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG)
and the Australian National Herbarium (CANB).
IBIS provides the infrastructure, applications and services supporting
biodiversity informatics for the ANBG, CANB and their partnership with
CSIRO Plant Industry, the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research (CPBR).
IBIS incorporates systems for the integration, retrieval and disemination
of biodiversity information; collections management (ALIVE, ANHSIR, NPPI);
digital asset management;
nomenclatural and taxonomic indices (APNI, APC); information
delivery (www.anbg|cpbr.gov.au); web services (flora-online) and;
federated database support (AVH, IPNI, GBIF).
Greg takes an active role in the the development
of national and international standards and protocols for data interchange
and database interoperability; contributing as a member
of the Australian Herbarium Systems Committee (HISCOM), a position on
the Atlas of Living Australa (ALA) scoping committee,
and participation within Bidiversity Information Standards (TDWG)
and its acivity groups (TAG, ABCD & TCS).
Currently chair of HISCOM (Herbarium Information Systems Committee)
he was also a participant at the GBIF, ECAT & DADI STAGs and a past vice
chairman of DADI working group. Information architect and development manager of the Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) , the Australian National Herbarium Specimen Information Register (ANHSIR), the Australian Plant Census (APC & WIN) and
the CPBR and ANBG biodiversity informatics web presence; a senior member of the design
and implementation teams responsible for the
International Plant Name Index (IPNI) and Australia's Virtual Herbarium (AVH) and a member of the Dept. of Environment and Heritage (DEH) Species Subcommittee.
He shares GBIF's vision of a distributed yet transparent global facility providing for the free availability, and interchange, of primary biodiversity information resources presenting as a truely international enterprise - the utimate market place for biodiversity information - and has been working toward this ideal for two decades. HISPID, the first biodiversity interchange standard, resulted from our HISCOM colloborations and made AVH possible. At the end of 1992 the Australian National Herbarium Information Register was the the first biodiversity dataset available on the internet and in March 1993 the first deployed using the world wide web (WWW) and the first freely available in TDWG standard format (HISPID).
Contact details:
Greg Whitbread
- Australian
National Botanic Gardens
- G.P.O. Box 1777
- Canberra
- ACT 2601
- Australia
- Email: ghw@anbg.gov.au
- Phone: +61-2-62509482
- Mobile:+61-418-670-369
- Fax: +61-2-62509599
