While distributed networks of biodiversity information are being developed and are starting to deliver on their goals, there remain many hurdles to be overcome for individual institutions in delivering data to these networks. Organisations face hurdles in the form of organizational policies, missing or unavailable infrastructure, a lack of skills and resources, and a range of issues relating to managing people and their expectations.

HermesLite is an open source tool set created as a result of a project for the Western Australian Museum to assist in the mobilization of data outside of the institution. HermesLite’s validation framework performs customizable checks for correct types and rational values for data, e.g. a longitude of “401” or “Four hundred and 1” is likely to be incorrect. HermesLite integrates with a variety of data serving tools such as TAPIRLink and MapServer to make the data accessible to a range audiences and requires minimal changes to an organisational infrastructure that already delivers web content.

HermesLite was developed as an open source product that is freely available for other organizations to use to assist with their own challenges, and is available as a Sourceforge project as well as from the Gaia Resources web site (http://www.gaiaresources.com.au/hermeslite/) The authors will present their experiences in specifying, funding, developing, and implementing HermesLite and will also share some insight into mobilizing data from institutions of various sizes.