The HMAP database (http://www.hull.ac.uk/hmap) is an open access facility that currently comprises time series of commercial catches covering the period 1611-2000. It is a growing resource and extends more that 240,000 records and more than 100 species. Data are mostly recovered from archives, tax records, custom records or surveys. The facility includes a web guide to the database (the Data Directory) and a web library of dataset downloads (the Data Library), while users can create customized datasets through the HMAP Portal, which is an interactive facility for searching the database. A significant proportion of these holdings are currently available through OBIS. HMAP is a distributed data contributor and the constituent datasets have been mapped to the OBIS schema using DiGIR since 2004.
The HMAP program (http://www.hmapcoml.org) is the historical component of the Census of Marine Life (CoML). It is a multidisciplinary, collaborative project which aims to enhance knowledge and understanding of how and why the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the world's oceans changes over the long term. The HMAP program is currently composed of 9 datasets, 3 of which focus on trawl records from Southeast Australia, one on world whaling, 2 on Northwest Atlantic, and 3 on catch data from Norwegian and North and Baltic seas.
