Flagship Project on Biodiversity Informatics in Malaysia– current status and the way forward - an initiative by University of Malaya

<div><br></div><div>Malaysia is home to a rich assemblage of biological diversity and is one of the 12 mega diversity countries in the world. Yet, scarce endeavors have been taken to sustain these resources in a digitized form. This lack of digitization has resulted in the lack of unawareness of our natural resources and this is obvious when one tried to search online for databases on Malaysian fauna and flora. An initiative to digitize Malaysia’s very own biodiversity information which is to date, stored in reports, publications or any other documented forms, is very much needed. Inline to this initiative, a project was introduced to in 2003 with minimal funds to digitize data collected by University Malaya’s academics. This has resulted in various relational biodiversity databases on different flora and fauna (Sarinder et al., 2005). Since the flagship project started in 2011, more digitized data have been successfully collated and added which could be further analysed for knowledge. Some examples include the Monogenean Haptoral Bar Image Ontology which attempts to use images of the haptoral bar to group monogeneans for taxonomic purposes, Moth image recognition using DAISY to identify local moth species (with Dato Henry Barlow) and 3D modeling of the monogenean species from 2D illustrations stored in the Monogenean database and more recently developing a monogenean semantic vocabulary for Monogenean taxonomy ,GIS analysis of marine-fish from ecological distribution database (with Prof Chong VC) and image database on histology of flowers( Prof Datin Dr Lim Ah Lan) . There are other ongoing as well as new projects in the pipeline which include digitizing and ontologizing our Malaysian citrus species with Assoc Prof Normawati and freshwater algae with Datin Prof Aishah Salleh. projects which we believe could contribute in the development of the biodiversity informatics field in University Malaya and in Malaysia.