GBIF staff and partners discuss the key need for the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT), how it developed in response to community input, and how it continues to evolve to streamline and enhance the interoperability, discoverability and mobilization of new data types beyond basic Darwin Core records. Conclusion outlines the impact of the IPT on the biodiversity research community, highlights how it enhances data publishing in more traditional journal venues, and describes both new features implemented in the latest version and plans for future enhancements.
The planet is experiencing an ongoing global biodiversity crisis. Measuring the magnitude and rate of change more effectively requires access to organized, easily discoverable, and digitally-formatted biodiversity data, both legacy and new, from across the globe. Assembling this coherent digital representation of biodiversity requires the integration of data that have historically been analog, dispersed, and heterogeneous. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) is a software package developed to support biodiversity dataset publication in a common format. The IPT’s two primary functions are to 1) encode existing species occurrence datasets and checklists, such as records from natural history collections or observations, in the Darwin Core standard to enhance interoperability of data, and 2) publish and archive data and metadata for broad use in a Darwin Core Archive, a set of files following a standard format. Here we discuss the key need for the IPT, how it has developed in response to community input, and how it continues to evolve to streamline and enhance the interoperability, discoverability, and mobilization of new data types beyond basic Darwin Core records. We close with a discussion how IPT has impacted the biodiversity research community, how it enhances data publishing in more traditional journal venues, along with new features implemented in the latest version of the IPT, and future plans for more enhancements.
Robertson T, Döring M, Guralnick R, Bloom D, Wieczorek J, et al. (2014) The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit: Facilitating the Efficient Publishing of Biodiversity Data on the Internet. PLoS ONE 9(8): e102623. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102623
Editor: Damon P. Little, The New York Botanical Garden, United States of America.
© 2014 Roberston et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Robertson et al.