Ocean Biodiversity Information System

According to its web site as at July 2018, OBIS "is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development."

8 specific objectives are listed in the OBIS site, of which the leading item is to "Provide [the] world's largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format".

"[4] In May 2000, US Government Agencies in the National Oceanographic Partnership Program together with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded eight research projects to initiate OBIS.

Initially the system retrieved remote data in real time in response to a user query and used the KGS Mapper to visualize the results.

In 2004, centralized metadata indexing and cacheing was introduced leading to faster and more reliable results, and the c-squares mapper was added to options for data visualization.