Open WL Archief (OWA)

Since his first direct contact with computers in 1982 in the "Station Marine de Villefranche-sur-Mer" in France, he has always been fascinated by their capacity for information storage and data analyses in Systematics. It took him two masters (actually one DEA and one DESS in University Paris 6) to acquire a combination of biological oceanography and computer engineering skills to end up in Biodiversity Informatics in the natural history museum in Paris (MNHN, 1992-2005) where he obtained a Doctorate (PhD) on this subject. He participated in many Biodiversity Informatics projects between 1999 and 2005, incl. Fauna Europaea, organized the 3rd GBIF Governing Board in Paris, and the first release of the Catalogue of Life, both in 2001. His first contact with WoRMS was during ERMS actually for listing the European marine fishes. At that time he was already collaborating with FishBase that he joined later on in the Philippines (2005-2014) as the Manager. FishBase has provided the information on fishes to WoRMS at an early stage, and we continue the main updates. As a taxonomic editor with an external database however, questions arise about "semi-automatic" updates, overlaps of coverage/mandate, and coordination of the collaboration These issues interest him also as the Taxonomic Chair of the Catalogue of Life, and also because he created the first database content of SeaLifeBase at the same time WoRMS was starting. He continue to be a Scientific Adviser for SeaLifeBase. He also currently uses WoRMS intensively as the Scientific Director of LifeWatchGreece in the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (2014-2016), because he resumed previous efforts to compile the list of species of Greece, and because he quality control names for the MedOBIS node (esp. The so-called 'historical' data with difficult names). This intensive use allowed him to accumulate discussion topics for the improvement of WoRMS. In addition he is keen to increase the collaboration between WoRMS and SeaLifeBase that contains a number of life traits already, a more recent target for WoRMS. Currently (2018) hosted by the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia Fish Collection, Vancouver