Birds, bees and monster fish: how Drupal serves global biosecurity

The International Biosecurity Intelligence System (IBIS) is a Drupal based web crawler and media aggregator of biosecurity information, currently in its second year of development. IBIS is collaboration between Australia’s Department of Agriculture and New Zealand’s Ministry of Primary Industries aimed at the early identification of international biosecurity threats for better planning and rapid response.

Previously the monitoring of biosceurity threats has been undertaken manually in a time and effort consuming method with poor information management practices. IBIS is changing this situation by being able to quickly identify biosceurity information sources that can lead to potential and emerging issues. IBIS has significant international interest with over 30% of traffic being from non-Australian and New Zealand countries.

With the success of IBIS, we would like to share the conception and algorithms to a broader usage, so that IBIS can be used not only in the biosecurity society but also in other communities to meet their special requirements. A Drupal distribution based on IBIS has been under development in 2015 and different organisations in Australia have shown interest in using it.

In this session, we will be sharing the story of IBIS:

• Why IBIS is needed by the Australian and New Zealand governments.

• How IBIS is used and what value has been produced.

• The technology and algorithms behind the scene.

• The benefit IBIS can bring to the Drupal community.

• The future of IBIS and how you can contribute to the project.