Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT)

Introduction

The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit – or IPT for short – is a free and open source web application for publishing biodiversity data. Developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) with the help of the biodiversity informatics community including Canadensys, it has become the recommended way to publish biodiversity data.

The Canadensys repository is the first registered IPT in Canada and the first customized IPT in the world. Its user interface is available in French and English. We use it to publish and register all our datasets. If you are interested to use it for your own publication needs, see our publication guide for more details.

Key features

• Manage and publish four types of biodiversity data:
  • Primary occurrence data (including specimens)
  • Taxonomic checklists
  • General resource metadata
  • Sampling-event data
• Import from any common database, delimited text files (e.g. csv), or existing Darwin Core Archive.
• Manage your dataset metadata with the built-in editor. Metadata is expressed according to the GBIF metadata profile.
• Publish your dataset in standards-compliant Darwin Core Archives (DwC-A) and Ecological Modeling Language (EML v2.1.1).
• Register your dataset/organization with the GBIF registry, allowing your data to become available to an international audience on the GBIF data portal and ensuring full attribution is given to your institution.

Tools

• Canadensys repository (powered by IPT)
• GBIF demo IPT
• List of all registered IPTs worldwide

Documents

• GBIF IPT project page
• GBIF IPT user manual
• Blog posts about IPT
• GBIF IPT introduction page
• DwC/IPT workshop (Berkeley 2010)
• Robertson et al., 2014. The GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit: Facilitating the Efficient Publishing of Biodiversity Data on the Internet.

IPT version 1

By IPT, we mean the current version (IPT version 2). This version is radically different from IPT version 1, which included more features (maps, charts, search, TAPIR), but was harder to install and often slow to respond. The current version is light-weight, faster and easier to use. IPT version 1 is no longer supported.