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The EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy provides taxonomists with a set of coupled tools for full access to taxonomic data, editing and managing data, collaborative work and high quality publishing of data. Based on the EDIT Common Data Model (CDM) establishing interoperability between various applications was a major aim during development. In addition to support for leading taxonomic data exchange standards (ABCD, DwC, TCS, SDD) this includes a webservice oriented architecture which has been in place from the early days on. It is designed for both intraplatform communications as well as exposing data to the public web.

The base of this architecture is a the REST API (http://cybertaxonomy.eu/cdmlib/rest-api.html#API_Service) which basically exposes generic access to nearly all data available in an EDIT CDM instance. In addition to this a set of targeted performance-optimised services have been developed to address the needs of specific use cases. These services can be grouped into portal services being optimized for usage for CDM Data Portals, search services for fast searching CDM instances, catalog services for optimized retrieval of names and occurrences, statistics services, data export services and harvesting services (OAI-PMH). All services come with a thorough, consistent and machine readable documentation which allows seamless integration into external infrastructures and workflow environments.

The development of the EDIT Platform services infrastructure has been driven by 4 factors that were recognized to be crucial for acceptance of most web services: stability, performance, detailed and exhaustive documentation and availability. In the presentation it will be demonstrated how these goals were achieved and what the lessons learned are.

The EDIT Platform service infrastructure has been developed within the EU funded projects EDIT, i4Life, BioVeL and EU BON as well the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funded project Edaphobase.