NBN Index

The NBNIndex has been discontinued

As of October 2010 the NBN Index is no longer available online. After over ten years the Index has been discontinued pending a review of the requirement for and general interest in an online directory of such data. We regret any inconvenience this may cause but the project has not been supported by the NBN since 2000 and sub-projects such as WAPIS that require the online index have been discontinued. If you would like to see similar data provided online through UKWildlife please get in touch and as we may initiate a similar but community led project if there is enough interest.

The NBN Index was created in 1999 by the JNCC to provide a means by which datasets could be ‘described’ and therefore discovered online. The Index was based on a metadata schema that follows the philosophy of later RDFa schemes to enable the discovery of data by both human and machine methods. Simply put the idea was to highlight data sets that existed so that access could be encouraged for data use and sharing and to avoid duplication of recording effort. The project has been succeeded by the NBN Gateway. Although the NBN Index project was discontinued we have hosted the NBN Index since 2000 and it is integral to other ‘live’ projects such as The Woodpasture and Parkland Information System (WAPIS) which uses the NBN Index to host metadata about woodland data sets. The NBN Index is built using a custom content management system developed by Blue-Bag Ltd (pre-dating later systems such as Drupal). The application was written in Delphi as an ISAPI web application and uses a tag based template system that enables re-skinning of the front end. This method also underlies the Species Dictionary project undertaken for the Natural History Museum. After 10 years of little attention (the NBN Index was taken over by the NBN Gateway) we then reskinned the NBN Index to link it into the new look UKWildlife site.

In October 2010 the NBNIndex was finally taken off line. If you would like to see similar data provided online thought UKWildlife get in touch and as we may initiate a similar but community led project if there is enough interest.

Indexing metadata

Metadata is information that describes a resource of information; such as data sets, web sites, web pages and other physical or electronic media. The NBN Index stores information that describes datasets associated with biodiversity conservation and research. The metadata provide details of what the data are about, who owns them, their format and species, locations and biotopes to which they relate. The NBNIndex enables you to ‘discover’ sources of information by listing or searching for any of the following.

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