Accepted For Presentation at U.S. Geological Survey Ninth National Computer Technology Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, April 6-9, 1998.

D'ERCHIA, Frank, USGS, BRD, P.O. Box 25046, MS 300, Bldg. 20, Denver, Colorado 80225;
FRONDORF, Anne, USGS, BRD, MS 300, 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Virginia 20192;
NYQUIST, Maurice, USGS, BRD, P.O. Box 25046, MS 302, Denver, Colorado 80225;
STITT, Susan, USGS, BRD, P.O. Box 25046, MS 302, Denver, Colorado 80225;
WAGGONER, Gary, USGS, BRD, P.O. Box 25046, MS 302, Denver, Colorado 80225

The U.S. Geological Survey is leading a broad cooperative effort to develop a National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). The NBII is a distributed electronic federation, through which biological data from a variety of sources including Federal and State government agencies, universities, natural history museums, private organizations, and others, is made more available for retrieval, integration, and application to resources management issues. In addition to making progress in supporting greater access to valuable biological data, the NBII program is successfully promoting the development and use of new standards that make it easier to describe and exchange these data. This includes the development of a biological "profile" of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata that increases the utility of this standard for documenting biological data. Use of this standardized way of describing biological data makes it easier for biological scientists and other interested users to compare and contrast among many different biological data sources. It will also help to broaden the understanding and implementation of the FGDC geospatial metadata content standard within the biological sciences community. The NBII program has implemented a prototype NSDI/FGDC-compliant Clearinghouse node, which also incorporates searching capabilities on the extended "biological metadata" fields. This capability is being implemented initially on a node operating at the USGS Environmental Management Technical Center, with the expectation that this type of "biologically enhanced NSDI Clearinghouse node" could be implemented by other USGS offices and by NBII/NSDI partners and cooperators. The NBII program has also developed a pc-based software tool ("MetaMaker") which supports production of metadata in compliance with the FGDC geospatial metadata standard and the biological "profile" of the FGDC standard. The NBII program is also supporting the development of and utilizing the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) as an authority file for scientific names to further support biological data exchange and integration. ITIS is the first national database of standardized nomenclature for U.S. plant and animal species. Having online access to this standard reference makes it possible for biologists to share data, even where their respective data sets may apply a different name to the same species.