The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit User Manual

• The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit User Manual
• 1. Background Information

1. Background Information

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) works to make digital biodiversity data openly and freely available on the internet for everyone. GBIF provides access to scientific biodiversity data for decision-making, research endeavours and public use. GBIF endorses both open source software and open data access.

In terms of structure, GBIF is a dynamic, growing partnership of countries, organisations, institutions and individuals working together to mobilise scientific biodiversity data.

GBIF is also a network of data publishers who retain ownership and control of the data they share. Linked datasets provide a more robust representation of biodiversity than any single dataset.

In this framework, GBIF develops software tools to make it possible to easily integrate biodiversity data from heterogeneous sources using common standards and protocols. One of these tools is the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) that this user manual refers to.

The GBIF IPT is an open source, Java (TM) based web application that connects and serves three types of biodiversity data: taxon primary occurrence data, taxon checklists and general resource metadata. The data registered in a GBIF IPT instance is connected to the GBIF distributed network and made available for public consultation and use. Several factors have motivated the development of this new tool:

• the limitations of the existing systems to publish primary biodiversity occurrence records that use tools and protocols that were not designed to transfer big amounts of records (DiGIR, TAPIR, ABCD);
• the need to decentralise and speed up the process of indexing biodiversity occurrence datasets;
• the need to offer additional benefits and services to the data publishers to encourage data publication (i.e. public web interface to browse/expose (meta)data or mapping services);
• the need to offer data quality assessment tools to data publishers and to generalise data cleaning habits;
• the need to increase data exchange using globally accepted formats (i.e. OGC web services);
• the need for easy ways to monitor data access and use for the different resources connected to the GBIF Network;
• the lack of appropriate tools to publish certain types of biodiversity data, such as names checklists and dataset metadata;
• existing requests to facilitate and automate dataset registration with the GBIF network;
• the requirement to implement (and assign if needed) Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) associated to all published elements to increase interoperability in the GBIF Network;

The GBIF IPT, as an open source project, is made freely available for both those who wish to use it to publish their data and those who wish to participate in its development, documentation and helpdesk. This is a list of the current online resources related to the GBIF IPT:

• the GBIF IPT mailing list: http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/ipt/;
• the GBIF IPT test installation (for testing purposes): http://ipt.gbif.org/;
• the GBIF IPT code site: http://gbif-providertoolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/gbif-ipt-docs/screenshots/.