On the opportunity of exploiting open Geospatial standard for biotic data management.

Numerousness of formats characterizes the state of the art in biodiversity data management. If compared to other research field, there is a lack in harmonization and standardization of these data. If on the one hand data from traditional biodiversity collections (from museums, national parks, etc.) can be easily represented by existing de-facto standard, on the other hand the growing number of field observation, for instance by VGI activities (e.g. iNaturalist [1]) or from automated systems (e.g. animal biotelemetry), would at least require upgrades of the currently used formats. Moreover, in an eco-informatics perspective, the usage of data from different scientific fields is to be expected (abiotic data, geographic information, etc.) and the possibility to represent this information and biodiversity data in a homogeneous way could be an advantage for interoperability. We will discuss the opportunity of exploitation of the standard for observation data by Open Geospatial Consortium, namely Observation and Measurements (O&M) [2], a model developed for sensor data but with strong analogies with the biodiversity-oriented OBOE ontology [3]. The applicability of OGC O&M has been yet suggested by INSPIRE Cross Thematic Working Group on Observations & Measurements [4] and New Zealand Environmental Information Interoperability Framework [5]. In our opinion, could be an advantage for the biodiversity community. We will propose some example and the advatages offered by O&M with respect to other representation format.