Background and History

The development of the standard has been leaded by the Costa Rican and the Spanish nodes (CRBio and GBIF.ES) of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) network.

Product of the implementation of the project: “Tools development for the integration of species information” in which GBIF.ES and CRBio are involved, the first draft version of the Plinian Core was documented in September, 2005. The project was conceived to solve the necessity of offering to the users of both nodes a portal that could integrate species information with specimen and observations data.

One of the initial activities of the project consisted of carrying out an evaluation process of the existing standards in the biodiversity field and the type of information associated to species that had been published on the Internet. The evaluation results demonstrated the necessity of establishing a species standard that could be used in the automated integration and recovering process of information from heterogeneous databases. The Plinian Core version 1.0 was developed taking into account the GBIF.CR and GBIF.ES previous experience managing species information for specialized users in subjects related to biodiversity as well as users of other areas, in addition to the feedback obtained from both nodes members.

Currently, the Plinian Core is in a validation process with the objective of gathering suggestions from other interested user groups. The first validation was made during the Technical workshop of the Species and Specimens Thematic Network of IABIN (September, 2006. Costa Rica). The second validations round was made in December 2006, with our participation in two workshops and meetings in which we have exposed the standard: the Iberian – American workshop for the advance of biodiversity information exchange with emphasis on biological collections (December, 2006. Colombia) and the IABIN’s Pollinators Thematic Network Technical Workshop (December, 2006. Brazil). Participants of both workshops were interested in making contributions during the process of consolidation of the Plinian Core and in using it in their institutions and countries.

Last year, the Species and Specimens Thematic Network of IABIN (SSTN) selected the Plinian Core as the standard to share species information inside the network; SSTN is part of the project and is developing compatible tools using it.