The new GBIF Registry, in operation since July 2010 (and replacing the original UDDI registry), allows a GBIF participant to register information on resources, institutions and services including access point URLS for the latter. GBIF then uses the access point to communicate with the provider to gather metadata about the data being served.

Hitherto, GBIF did not offer a separate catalogue or dedicated client for browsing/searching metadata. Instead, metadata are deeply integrated in the Data Portal and presented as part of the four general search routes into data (species, countries, datasets and occurrences). The metadata catalogue complements the presentation of metadata via the Data Portal by providing the functionalities and services of a dedicated metadata catalogue system.

The following dataset-level metadata elements are currently processed via service requests:

• Data provider details (Name, Website, GBIF participant, Description, Country, Added to portal, Information updated)
• Provider (DiGIR, BioCASe, TAPIR) binding
• Name (of dataset)
• Website
• Description
• Citation
• How to cite this dataset
• Basis of record
• Access point URL
• Added to portal
• Information updated
• Contacts (Name, Role, Address, Email, Telephone)
• Data networks.

Through the GBIF indexing process, users can also derive the following information:

• Occurrences records indexed
• Number of records shared by provider
• Occurrences with coordinates
• Occurrences with no geospatial issues
• Number of species
• Number of taxa.