Spanish GBIF Node

The Spanish GBIF Node is called "GBIF-España" or simply GBIF.ES. In February 2001, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Thus, Spain became a member and voting participant of GBIF.

The Ministry of Science and Technology commissioned the Spanish High Council of Research (CSIC) -by means of the Government Official Journal (BOE)- to initiate and coordinate the activities of GBIF in Spain. The CSIC, with support and advice of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales and the Real Jardín Botánico established the Coordination Unit, which begins its activities in June 2003.

GBIF.ES is set up as a network of data nodes (institutes, projects, departments and individuals) and a Coordination Unit.

The main mission of the Coordination Unit is to support natural history collections, institutes and relevant biodiversity projects in order to gain their participation by...

• Supplying them with technical support, information, training, standards, software and advice.
   
• Providing coherence between national initiatives and the GBIF information architecture in order to assure interoperability
   
• Analyzing how to maximize the data value by developing tools for data analysis, validation and visualization.
   
• Compiling and distributing relevant information to the benefit of collections as well as to our knowledge of biodiversity and its management.
   
• Coordinating the activities of the institutes and international initiatives.

It is regarded as fundamental that all institutes in possession of biodiversity data participate in the GBIF initiative in Spain.

The information contained in each collection -regardless of its size- is unique. By participating in GBIF, the institutes and collections will contribute biodiversity data to GBIF at all scales, gaining technical support, visibility and recognition.

The institutes and projects involved may obtain funding through the program 'Complementary Actions' of the Ministry of Education and Science (more information on funding in Spain), among other sources.

From a functional point of view, the node can be regarded as a distributed system of data bases offering data access. There will be no great centralized data base to which every collection contributes. Instead, each collection creates, maintains and manages its own data base and thus controls what information is made accessible (or not) via Internet.

In addition to this federation of databases there will be a system in charge of gathering the query results from all connected nodes and of presenting them in a coherent manner, which is similar to Internet browsers such as Google. This network may be symmetrical in the sense that all the participating institutes are at the same time access points to the entire information.

The advantages of such a system are that data providers maintain control over their data, updates are made automatically and data origin and authorship are obvious.

• Brochure of GBIF.ES (PDF - in Spanish).  
• Proposal and Action Plan of the Spanish node of GBIF with details on concept, objetives and plan of action. Various aspects have changed since that notice (reduction in personnel and funding, etc.) but it is still representative of what is being implemented.  
• Spanish GBIF portals: site with a detailed list of the different portals related to the Spanish GBIF initiative such as the communication portal, data portal, Species data portal, etc.
• GBIF Fact Sheet (in Spanish, PDF).