Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Toolkit

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility Portal Toolkit (GBIF PTK) (http://www.gbif.org/) was developed from the European Community Clearing House Mechanism (EC CHM) Toolkit. However, the GBIF has customized it in several ways to support the GBIF mandate for data sharing and interoperability. The generic functions, which are the same as those of the EC CHM Toolkit, include the following:


 
  • The ability to compile News/ syndicated news via Rich Site Summary (RSS) from collaborating sites;
  • An events calendar;
  • A hierarchical directory of articles, documents, links, images, audio and video components;
  • Submissions of the above content by any user, and workflow for approval by the Webmaster;
  • A search function;
  • Download features for Web tools;
  • General information about GBIF;
  • Suggestions and feedback from users.

The GBIF PTK includes data management components, which support data sharing within the GBIF network. These functions include the following:

  • Repository for shared datasets (the dataset would typically be of specimen and observation data, and can be in any format including spreadsheet, database file or XML (recommended for querying);
  • Advertising the datasets from the repository towards the UDDI-based central metadata registry of the GBIF with the SOAP protocol and querying/indexing them using the Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) protocol. The shared datasets are described in the Dublin Core (information on the Dublin Core is available in Module 6);
  • Querying and downloading of datasets from the repository through an HTML user interface or via the DiGIR protocol.

 

 

The GBIF PTK has been developed in Zope and it functions under Linux and Windows. The Portal Toolkit (PTK) and the data repository component can be installed independently from each other. They power the website http://www.gbif.org and are presently available for downloading from the same URL.

The GBIF PTK installation at the GBIF Secretariat has been integrated with the CIRCA group collaboration tool. It provides a Lightweight Directory Application Protocol (LDAP) based directory of users, organisations and their roles. It also provides mailing lists, newsgroups, and private document sharing areas for GBIF committees.

CIRCA is a product of the European Commission and is available for free, but currently only for European public administrations. GBIF uses the CIRCA installation of the University of Copenhagen. CIRCA is a virtual collaborative environment allowing users to exchange information and expertise.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. Hannu Saarenmaa
Deputy Director for Informatics
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100, Copenhagen
Denmark
Email:hsaarenmaa@gbif.org