Open WL Archief (OWA)

Gary has been developing databases of marine mollusks since the early 1990s and his Malacolog database for Western Atlantic species has been online since 1995. He has been involved with WoRMS since 2009 as one of the editors for Mollusca and is one of the core group that developed MolluscaBase as an outgrowth of WoRMS. The data assembled in WoRMS enabled his 2014 publication estimating global diversity of Recent Mollusca. It has been gratifying to see WoRMS become a community standard, but he thinks more can be done to improve its usefulness and reliability, such as search interfaces that allow simultaneous access to more fields, better algorithms for name matching, and more rigorous approaches to documentation.