As a thematic node of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), a group of investigators, led by Andrew Read and Patrick Halpin of Duke University, started building Ocean Biogeographic Information System Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations (OBIS-SEAMAP), a spatially, temporally interactive online archive for marine mammal, sea turtle, seabird and ray & shark data back in 2002. This service is made possible by data sharing from contributors all over the world.
OBIS was one of the projects of Census of Marine Life and now is a project under IOC-UNESCO's International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE).
The observation data held by OBIS-SEAMAP are collected from various data providers worldwide. They are registered into the OBIS-SEAMAP database and presented on the web site upon data providers' permission. The ownership of the data belongs to the data providers.