The GBIF Secretariat developed the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) as a software platform to facilitate the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the Internet, using the GBIF network. 

The IPT is the recommended solution by the Secretariat for publishers. However, data published using other software platforms – such as DiGIR, BioCASE or TapirLink – will continue to be harvested and indexed by the GBIF
core infrastructure

Key features of the IPT

• Manage and publish three types of data:
  • taxon primary occurrence data
  • taxonomic checklists
  • resource metadata
• Import from any common database, delimited text files (e.g. csv), or existing DarwinCore Archives
• Author metadata according to the GBIF metadata profile
• Publish in standards-compliant DarwinCore Archives (DwC-A) and Ecological Modeling Language (EML v2.1.1)
• Simple integration with the GBIF registry, to ease discovery and indexing of the published data
• Integrated DwC-A extensions that can be added to an installation as needed
• Control the visibility of individual data resources - keep private to local IPT users, publish to DwC-A, or publish to DwC-A and register with GBIF
• Java-based web-application runs in standard web servers on Windows, Linux, Unix and Apple OS X

Download and demo site

You can DOWNLOAD the IPT at the project site, and please also consider joining the IPT user and/or developer mailing lists.  To get a feel for how the IPT works you can access an installed instance of the latest release of the IPT at the demo site.  

IPT v2.0 Uptake Roadmap

The user manual, technical manual and software for version 2.0 of the IPT were made available for download on February 10, 2011 (at the project site).  A pre-launch process will run until the official launch of the IPT in October, 2011 at the 18th GBIF Governing Board Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Key milestones in this process will be:

• A minor version release by the end of March 2011, which is scheduled to address any issues the early adopters find, but with a minimal amount of new features. Changes in minor releases will be controlled to ensure that the data directory is not affected, and users can simply replace the .war file and continue to use their existing configuration.
• An IPT Experts Workshop to be held in June-July 2011, after which the trained experts will be available to provide distributed helpdesk support to the GBIF community.
• The release of a detailed IPT deployment strategy for GBIF Participant Nodes in July-August 2011.
• A Data Publishing Workshop for all GBIF Participant Nodes at GB18 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Other Publishing Tools

While the IPT is the recommended way of publishing data through the GBIF network, there are other publishing tools available from GBIF and the wider community.  Those tools are described on the Publishing Software page.