TDWG Congratulates GBIF on the Launch of its New Portal

By: Lee Belbin

The launch of the new GBIF portal occurred at the twelfth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of Parties' Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on July 2^nd 2007.

From GBIF’s press release: Improvements in the portal include:

• Users are able to search on taxon (species or higher), country or dataset.
• Maps even at kingdom level are relatively fast to load because they are plotted as record density in a 1 x 1 degree cell. It is possible to "drill down" within such a cell as far as 0.1 x 0.1 degree. At that point, clicking on a cell will bring up the original data record.
• Users can search on genera, families, and all the way up to kingdom and plot multiple species on the same map.
• A very advanced (occurrence) search can specify geographic region, country or bounding box, level of classification, and about 16 other search filters including time series.
• The user can choose among several taxonomies.
• Users can plot data directly to Google Earth, either as record densities or as placemarks.
• Links to images of organisms are supplied where available.

The GBIF portal uses Darwin Core and ABCD over DiGIR/BioCASe/TAPIR to connect all of the data, and uses the new TDWG Life Science Identifier (LSID) vocabularies (based on Darwin Core and TCS) in its web services. The portal is also displaying LSIDs from IPNI and Index Fungorum and uses the TDWG resolver to retrieve their metadata. GBIF welcomes any comments, suggestions and complaints to portal@gbif.org.

TDWG is proud of its association with GBIF and hopes that the new portal will be a great success in advancing global biodiversity issues.

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