This page is under construction and subject to significant revision.

Introduction

In 2007 a number of different projects and organisations with a taxonomic focus, met to discuss the development of components of the Global Names Architecture in a venue entitled Nomina II. One outcome of this meeting was the identification of a community need for cross-project discovery and linking. A simple specification and architectural framework was developed to facilitate the publication of simple species-level indexes of content held within dat portals, databases, and other holdings of community members. The EOL and GBIF commissioned the development of an implementation for this specification. The result is the portal called the Global Names Index (GNI).

The GNI allows publishers of information on species to upload a list of species treated within their respective data systems tied to a link to a page, service, or index.

The GNI provides summaries, evaluations and services that facilitate accessing and linking to related information. It supports tools that promote discovery of species information by dynamically embedding links between disparate data resources.

Example: In this example, the GNI is accessed by the EOL Name Tag Web Service to dynamically embed links to the Dutch GBIF Node (NLBIF) within an associated species observation website.