The National Biological Information Infrastructure: Present and Future Ellen Paul American Institute of Biological Sciences Public Policy Representative Washington, D.C. epaul@aibs.org Finding the vast amounts of biological data related to the management, study, and use of biological resources cached in hundreds of databases around the world is difficult at best. According to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), most of this information sits unused because of a lack of efficient means to retrieve and derive comprehensible information from it. A solution is in the midst of development: The National Biological Information Infrastructure, an initiative of the US Geological Survey's Biological Resources Division (BRD), will eventually allow researchers, land and natural resource managers, students, and the general public to locate these databases, query multiple databases simultaneously, and retrieve data. But NBII is still far from achieving this goal, and the substantial funding needed to make biological data more accessible via NBII comes from the same dwindling pool of money for research that generates those data. When NBII is completed, users will be able to draw from any number of databases to assess biological and environmental processes and conditions. NBII will also provide software to help
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