ORNIS will merge the specimens of 29 ornithology collections.

BRC Informatics, in partnership with UC Berkeley, Yale University, and 26 collaborating institutions, recently began an ambitious effort to create a biodiversity informatics portal for ornithology collections. ORNithological Information System (ORNIS) will contain 3.9 million specimen records from over 10,000 avian species in 29 collections. Users on the ORNIS network will access and compare records in the 29 collections as if all data sources were part of a single virtual collection. ORNIS is made possible through DiGIR technology.

With each new project, BRC Informatics and its collaborating partners add new tools to the expanding infrastructure for Biodiversity Informatics. The ORNIS project will contribute some important new features to the DiGIR distributed environment.

One of the ORNIS innovations will be dynamic georeferencing. Georeferencing techniques vary among collectors and institutions. Before the advent of GPS technology, researchers were often unable to determine the latitude and longitude coordinates for a field location, and collectors instead described their location through imprecise references to cities or geographical features. Advanced habitat modeling tools such as DesktopGARP require consistent and accurate latitude and longitude references for all collecting locations. One of the major tasks in setting up a network like ORNIS is adding latitude and longitude fields to existing records. ORNIS pioneers a new dynamic georeferencing technique that is more convenient and more powerful than the static methods used with DiGIR projects such as MaNIS and HerpNET. The ORNIS “live gazetteer” will provide up-to-date georeference information as a live network service that will be incorporated into data entry and access procedures.

ORNIS also unveils new error-checking techniques and tools. The ORNIS error-checking framework will automatically uncover and correct errors in temporal, taxonomic, and geographical data.

Once ORNIS's georeferencing and error-checking tools are developed, these tools will be available to all future DiGIR-based informatics projects.