The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organization 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 203 millions occurrences from many institutions from around the world.

Biodiversity information is largely distributed between many institutions, many projects, many information systems. For the primary data (it means the data related to specimens or observations, and taxonomic names), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is the main access point at worldwide level. So it is (or will be) the backbone for other enlarged projects (e.g; GEOBON) integrating many types of data and knowledge related to biodiversity and environment.

At a national level, the Biodiversity Information landscape is also complex.

One of the challenge to take up for each node is the heterogeneity management of all biodiversity national actors to be able to tell if the data were checked or not and in term of granularity to avoid providing several times the same data.

Besides the actual strategy of the GBIF is focused on increasing the data flow, and then concerning the data quality policy each provider is responsible of its own data.

So to improve both the flow and the data quality, GBIF France is collaborating with several national projects to encourage a national cohesion by using unique identifiers for each dataset, by developing common metadata format, by creating interoperable tools and by proposing an additional tag for deeply checked data.

In practical terms, GBIF France is actually working with 4 national projects :

• the National Metadata Format Group

• the National Inventory of the Natural Patrimony (INPN)

• the Information System for Nature and Landscape (SINP)

• a national project of a unique connection point for several databases (IRD Sud)

This work is still in progress, but we are convinced that it will give something to think about for actors who need to share heterogeneous data using the TDWG standards.