faulker045

The current GBIF data portal was started in 2007 to provide access to the network's biodiversity data - at the time that meant a federated search across 220 providers and 76 million occurrence records. While that approach has served us well over the years, there are many features that have been requested for the portal that weren't addressable in the current architecture. Combined with the fact that we're now well over 300 million occurrence records, with millions of new taxonomic records to boot, it becomes clear that a new portal is needed. After a long consultation process with the wider community the initial requirements of a new portal have been determined, and I'm pleased to report that work has officially started on its design and development. For the last 6 months or so the development team has been working on improving our rollover process, registry improvements, IPT development, and disparate other tasks. The new portal marks an important milestone in ou...

(A guest post from our friends at VertNet, cross-posted from the VertNet blog ) This week we’d like to discuss the current and future roles of the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) in VertNet. IPT is a Java-based web application that allows a user to publish and share biodiversity data sets from a server. Here are some of the things IPT can do: Create Darwin Core Archives. In our post about data publishing last week, we wrote about Darwin Core being the “language of choice” for VertNet. IPT allows publishers to create Darwin Core data records from either files or databases and to export them in zipped archive files that contain exactly what is needed by VertNet for uploading. Make data available for efficient indexing by GBIF. VertNet has an agreement with its data publishers that, by participating, they will also publish data through GBIF. GBIF keeps our registry of data providers and uses this registry to find and update data periodically from the original so...