THE GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY INFORMATION FACILITY:
AN INTEROPERABLE NETWORK OF PRIMARY BIODIVERSITY DATABASES
JAMES EDWARDS
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), founded in March 2001, is an open-ended organisation of countries and other
international organisations devoted to making primary biodiversity data freely and openly available over the Internet. Although it
eventually intends to cover all levels of biodiversity, from molecules to ecosystems, GBIF has focused initially on species- and
specimen-level data. Each GBIF Participant (currently consisting of 39 countries and economies and 24 organisations) has agreed to
develop an Internet node for serving these data.
The first iteration of the GBIF data portal, which interoperably connects our Participants' nodes and other data providers, went
on-line in early February of this year. Working with its partners, GBIF has developed standards for documenting and exchanging
biodiversity data. It has also joined with the Catalogue of Life partnership to speed up the development of an authority file for the
approximately 1.8 million named species on Earth, as well as all of their synonyms and vernacular names.
In addition, GBIF is attempting to tackle several sociological and policy issues. It has developed a Memorandum of Co-operation with
the Convention on Biological Diversity and is a key promoter of the database-related components of the CBD's Global Taxonomy
Initiative and Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. GBIF provides seed-money grants to help digitise specimen and observational
information, has partnered with UNESCO to start a network of academic chairs in biodiversity informatics, and gives a yearly prize to
a scientist who creatively combines systematics and informatics research. Finally, GBIF is holding several consensus-building
workshops and contracting for white papers on topics such as IPR and data sharing with countries of origin.
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