The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. GBIF's information architecture makes these data accessible and searchable through a single portal. Currently the data portal provided more than 300 million occurrences from many institutions from around the world.

Data available through the GBIF portal are primarily distribution data on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes for the world, and scientific names data.
Priorities, with an emphasis on promoting participation and working through partners, include mobilising biodiversity data, developing protocols and standards to ensure scientific integrity and interoperability, building an informatics architecture to allow the interlinking of diverse data types from disparate sources, promoting capacity building and catalysing development of analytical tools for improved decision-making.

To fulfill this mission, GBIF has established a network of national nodes whose mission is to promote the existing information in its territory. The national node uses tools developed by GBIF to connect and publish data.Thus, GBIF France gathers data hosted by France and the node’s team provides support to data providers.

GBIF France aims to provide a Portal that offers the following functionalities:
- a complete and single view on data shared by data providers and offer a concrete exploration platform at a national level
- modules that could extract knowledge from this data and that could be adaptable to well answer the specific demand of the national actors.


To achieve this, GBIF France desire to harvest national content in a simple and customizable way.  
By reworking existent software into more reusable libraries, and then developing it further, GBIF France has been able to harvest data from its data publishers, whatever the mapping software used, and to store it in a local index, that will be the central point of development to come.

To ensure this is done in an open manner, the software has been committed to a public repository named GBIF Labs (http://code.google.com/p/gbif-labs/).  This is a small GBIF pilot project currently, but could expand over time to help promote knowledge sharing and collaboration in the GBIF network.

URLs: www.gbif.fr / www.gbif.org