I just attended a stimulating meeting here in DC with staff from the USGS's National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program. Also present were representatives from AIBS-member-societies the Ecological Society of America (who hosted the event at their headquarters office), the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Natural Science Collections Alliance.

NBII was demonstrating its impressive new search engine for online biological data. Everyone at the meeting came away with lots of ideas for how the search engine could be used for searches that are both broad and deep and gave many suggestions for its further development to NBII, who plan to hold additional community-feedback meetings in the future.

NBII invites contacts from organizations with databases to link to (contact: mlane@usgs.gov) and describes the search engine's extensive Web 2.0 capabilities in the following press release:

"August 17, 2009. The week of August 10, the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) launched a new search engine. The new NBII search is designed to support the discovery of and provide access to critical national and global biological information and data. The new NBII search engine is based on the Vivisimo Velocity search platform and features dynamic clustering, faceted searching, extensive source control, integration with the NBII LIFE image library, and the ability to simultaneously search critical global and national biodiversity resources such as the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF), Amphibiaweb, and the Missouri Botanical's TROPICOS database. The new NBII search supports flexible information acquisition through web site/database crawling and real time federated resource searching. Finally, the new NBII search supports the custom development of multiple information indexes, geospatial integration with Google Maps, visualization, and flexible control over search result displays. The new NBII search is available on the NBII Portal at http://www.nbii.gov/."