A portal that provides free access to information on Colombia’s biological diversity has been launched by the GBIF national node at http://www.sibcolombia.net.
The site allows users to explore, filter, access and download all specimen records and taxon lists published by museums, herbaria, universities and government agencies, which are partners of the Sistema de Información sobre Biodiversidad (SiB) – Colombia’s biodiversity information facility. Records can also be searched at the department level, which is the second tier of administration in the country.
SiB Colombia created the portal by customizing the open source tools developed by GBIF. Recycling the GBIF source code has saved SiB Colombia over six years of efforts to build a data integration and publishing platform. The source code for the national version is available here.
SiB Colombia has also released a seven-step guide to publishing data on the portal. It is based on a guide developed previously by Canadensys on publishing primary biodiversity data using the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT).