At Living Norway Ecological Data Network, we are working to facilitate open, reproducible and transparent research. How we manage and share data is important aspect of this activity. We are happy to announce that we have now launched our brand new data portal.
Since we started our network back in 2019, a central goal has been to build tools and data infrastructure to help researchers manage their data in a FAIR yet efficient manner. Along the way, we have built tools such as the LivingNorwayR package for software R, and an app built in R-shiny that can be used to visualize the content of a Darwin Core Archive data package. Now, we are happy to inform that we have also launched our own data portal. Please have a look at it, explore the data, and provide us with any feedback you might have.
Living Norway is working close together with GBIF, including the Norwegian GBIF node, and we use the GBIF infrastructure as a foundation: All data that you can find in the data portal is published using the GBIF publishing tools and registered with GBIF. You can read more about the data flow model here. We find this approach very awarding, and it allow us to focus our efforts on building additional tools rather than duplicating the great job that is already done by GBIF and other organizations.
One goal with our data portal is that data providers can gain visibility for their published data sets. We also hope the portal will help researchers and other data users find relevant data, and judge to which extent they are useful for their use case. Once you have found relevant datasets, you can use our LivingNorwayR package to import data directly to R. As you will see, each dataset is accompanied with a R-code chunk that can be used to import exactly that dataset. You can read more about how to access and use the data here. We will develop richer funcionality in the future, but if you have specific ideas for such functionality that would be useful, please let us know. You can e.g. post it as an issue on the portal GitHub repository.
Thanks to GBIF for hosting our portal!
When we were in the process of screening options for a dedicated data portal for our network, we were happy to learn that GBIF was just about to launch a hosted portal program (read more about this here). This is a service where GBIF offer to host a portal for networks and organizations that need their own data portal. The portals are then developed in collaboration with the GBIF secretariate in Copenhagen and the respective organizations. Living Norway will take this opportunity to thank the GBIF secretariate and the Norwegian GBIF node for fantastic help and support all the way.
Visit our data portal here: