All accumulated information of a species is tied to a scientific name, a name that serves as a link between what has been learned in the past and what we today add to the body of knowledge.¹ Grimaldi and Engel, Evolution of the Insects, 2005

All information about species is tied to a scientific name. Many species, however, may be known by multiple scientific and vernacular names. At the same time, the same name may refer to different species. These and other issues affect accessibility and interoperability within the GBIF network. To date, there is no complete catalogue of names nor information on how these names relate to species.

GBIF’s Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms (ECAT) programme seeks to address these issues by promoting the development of infrastructure and services for accessing sources of information about names and developing, in partnership with other initiatives, a complete catalogue of names and information about them. The resulting Global Names Architecture (GNA) seeks to:

• Provide a common framework for publishing, discovering, and accessing taxonomic checklist data
• Promote discovery and access to authoritative information about species names through a dynamic catalogue of checklists: Checklist Bank.
• Develop a complete inventory of all scientific and vernacular names used to refer to taxa (mostly species) by creating a global index of names tied to primary occurrence data, publications, and other information.
• Utilise these data to improve discovery and access to data and information about species through the GBIF network and to contribute to the creation of improved taxonomic checklists.

The Global Names Architecture offers a way to assess the number of scientific names in use across all of biology and evaluate how effectively they are currently treated within a range taxonomic and nomenclatural databases and initiatives. It makes it easier to create new and improved taxonomic data, which can be used directly as a tool for easier access and interoperability.

Detailed information about GNA infrastructure, tools, and workshops are maintained in our Project Repositories