History
The Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility (NLBIF) was established by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science (OCW). NLBIF is an independent foundation but physically hosted by Naturalis Biodiversity Center, in Leiden. The Ministry of OCW is currently the primary funding body, but both the UvA as well as NWO supported NLBIF financially in the early days.
NLBIF’s statutory mission is: (1) to act as the national (data) node for GBIF; (2) to act as the national platform for the international exchange and sharing of biodiversity data, information and knowledge available in The Netherlands and elsewhere; and (3) to encourage development and application of information technology to support data management, exchange, analysis and electronic distribution of biodiversity information worldwide.
Mission
NLBIF’s vision is the creation of a biodiversity data cloud from the Netherlands open to anybody.
The mission of NLBIF is to educate and discuss the virtues of open biodiversity data, to support data owners with the standardisation and online publication of their biodiversity data and to investigate and demonstrate the possibilities of the use of biodiversity data in an advanced e-science environment.
The NLBIF strategy is to build on the efforts of others and harvest and connect multi-disciplinary knowledge in a smart way. We invest in already exciting infrastructures with a focus on interoperability.
Structure
The governance structure of NLBIF is currently being revised.
Funding
The Ministry for Education, Culture and Science (OCW), is NLBIF’s primary funding body. Within the Ministry it is the Department of Research and Science Policy (OWB) that takes care of both the support for NLBIF as well as the basic financial contribution to GBIF.
