Europe’s e-infrastructure for taxonomic information on species in Europe.

PESI defines and coordinates strategies to enhance the quality and reliability of European biodiversity information by integrating the infrastructural components of four major community networks on taxonomic indexing, namely those of marine life, terrestrial plants, fungi and animals, into a joint work programme. This will include functional knowledge networks of both taxonomic experts and regional focal points, which will collaborate on the establishment of standardised and authoritative taxonomic (meta-)data. As a consequence PESI is selected as an INSPIRE directive (= formal standard) for Europe.

In addition, PESI will coordinate the integration and synchronisation of the European taxonomic information systems and services into a joint e-infrastructure and the creation of a common user-interface disseminating the pan-European checklists and associated user-services results. As such, the PESI Backbone runs as a gateway serving the optimal integration and sharing of biodiversity data from local to European level, supporting major biodiversity informatics initiatives like LifeWatch, EU BON, and GBIF.

PESI contributes to a (global) names-based architecture for linking biodiversity data (Global Names), including supporting routines for data discovery and nomenclator governance. On a global level, PESI also contributes to an agenda on reducing redundancy of species data resources, like the defragmentation of species (data) management, by sharing best practices for species data management.

PESI is well integrated into innovative biodiversity-informatics projects on e-Science (like BioVel) and e-Taxonomy (like ViBRANT), pushing the on-going virtualisation and internationalisation of the research domain, developing the next generation of virtual tools (e-Labs and work benches) and advancing cross-platform interoperability, supporting science as a community effort and allowing biodiversity assessments using large amounts of data from cross-disciplinary sources.

PESI will improve the taxonomic community involvement (as a taxonomic workforce) by further integrating the huge expertise networks of pan-Europaean checklists and Focal Points and developing alternative models to increase expert participation and promote an European approach on taxonomic expertise access and management supporting strategic bodies, like CETAF.

Web: http://www.eu-nomen.eu/pesi