A beginners guide to the Gateway
The NBN Gateway is the NBN’s main tool, developed by the NBN Trust and its partners, for communicating and sharing biodiversity data using the internet.
The Gateway provides:
- A mechanism to bring together datasets supplied by their owners. These are the Gateway’s data providers
- An on-line dataset management tool for data providers that helps them control access to their data.
- A search engine tailored to dealing with biodiversity data of a number of different kinds and from specified sources. A mechanism for presenting biodiversity data to site visitors using dynamic spatial referencing
- A mechanism for communicating the results of searches in a number of different ways to users, including the ability to download data.
- There are also Gateway web services so that you can get some of the Gateway data showing on your own websites.
The NBN Gateway is a web-based tool developed to help any organisation share the wildlife resources they hold with others. It provides a single point of access over the internet to wildlife information held by a wide range of organisations and groups. The website provides a secure environment in which data providers can manage how they share their data.
A wide range of public, private and voluntary bodies contribute this data to the Gateway within distinct datasets. Data providers control the availability of their own datasets to the public, registered individuals and organisations.
The Gateway and underlying database is hosted by the Biological Records Centre at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford.
COMPONENTS OF THE NBN GATEWAY
The NBN Gateway has a range of tools to help you learn more about biodiversity datasets as well as tools to help you find and interrogate any relevant data that they contain. These are the main functions currently available to you on the NBN Gateway:
- Search functions to find occurrence data for a species; or species data for a site or geographical area.
- Search capabilities to deliver habitat or other site related information or data.
- Search facilities to find third-party information relating to species or taxonomic groups.
- Tools to query information about the data available to users.
- A mechanism to facilitate gaining access to information provided by others.
- Tools to control access to data supplied to users.
- A function to allow feedback and queries from users of the Gateway to the NBN Trust.
THE GATEWAY USERS’ GUIDEBOOK
For a first visit it may not be clear what the Gateway website is capable of and what tools are available. To help new users get going with the site we have produced a guide on how to use the Gateway. In this section you will be able to find out:
- How to register, log-in and change account details
- How to set up and use an organisation account
- How to register for better access
- How to use the geo-searching tools
- How to produce a site report
- How to use the search engine
- How to produce a grid map for a species
- How to explore species data using the Interactive Map
- And a guide to Gateway functionality, the datasets on the Gateway, dataset metadata and access and use controls
Some of this you may already be familiar with parts of the Gateway so we have provided you with a tool to collect all the articles that are of use to you and to package them up in your own tailor made document. You can save this document to your desktop for reference at any time without the need to visit the site again. All you need to do is click on “add pages to pdf portfolio” for each page you wish to keep. It is that simple.
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