The fishes of Taiwan is comprised by 2,487 species in 252 families: about 10% of the world's fish. Taxonomic and distributional data of Taiwanese fish have been integrated into a database that can be accessed interactively over the Internet at http://fishdb.sinica.edu.tw. The database includes the following items: metadata on the fish and other animals or plants, basic information on species and families, curatorial (specimens) database which integrated 6 museums, distributional databases, a bibliographic database, underwater videos of fish, photo gallery of Taiwan fishes, rare Chinese characters with the “fish radical”, a search system for Chinese fish names of “Latin-Chinese Dictionary of fishes names”, and a new version of errata of “Fishes of Taiwan.” The result of this project has been made available for public access on the web. The “Fish Database of Taiwan” can be linked to the global fish database – “FishBase, http://www.fishbase.org” of WorldFish Center, and by using the species names as the primary key, more detailed information about each species can be obtained. This project also established a Chinese mirror site of FishBase ( http://fishbase.sinica.edu.tw) in Academia Sinica. Such collaboration between local and global database exemplifies local or regional biodiversity databases moving toward international cooperation.

<source: National Digital Archives Program web site>