Since its inception in 2001, GBIF’s focus has been on digitisation and mobilisation of primary biodiversity data. This focus is shifting from one on data mobilisation as a priority to a greater emphasis on data discovery first, then on data digitisation and mobilisation.

The DIGIT work area encourages national, regional and thematic implementation and enrichment of the Global Biodiversity Resources Discovery System (GBRDS) to facilitate the decentralised discovery of all biodiversity datasets worldwide. It capitalises on enthusiasm generated through the Global Strategy and Action Plan for mobilising Primary Biodiversity Data exercises and on progress made by the Biodiversity Collections Index (BCI) and other metadata cataloguing exercises (e.g. Knowledge Network for BioComplexity, ILTERNET, LifeWatch, etc.) to enrich the GBRDS content and volume of datasets discovery.

To facilitate this, we should to encourage national, regional and international science funding agencies, as well as GBIF Participants to make it mandatory to register dataset metadata.

We aim to achieve our mobilisation targets through several activities:

• Content Needs Assessment
• Global Strategy and Action Plans for mobilisation of primary biodiversity data
• Development and implementation of a Data Publishing Framework regime
• Development of strategies for industrialisation of digitisation of primary biodiversity data
• Encouragement to national, regional and thematic implementation of Integrated Publishing Toolkit
• Development of guidelines for ‘Data Hosting Centres’
• Improvement in ‘fitness for use’ of GBIF mobilised data
• Training manuals and targeted capacity building activities
• Strategy for a global fund for digitisation of primary biodiversity data.