Services
This page collects some of the IT-services provided by the Norwegian GBIF-Node. Contact us at helpdesk@gbif.no if you want assistance with publishing your species datasets!
Introducing BDQEmail: the Biodiversity Data Quality Email tool
BDQEmail won the Ebbe Nielsen award (jointly with galaxias) in 2025. It's a lightweight email service that allows researchers and institutions to easily check their datasets against the Biodiversity Data Quality standard test suite developed by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). The BDQ standard, created within TDWG’s Task Group 2 (TG2), defines a shared vocabulary and set of tests to evaluate and improve dataset fitness for use. While this represents a major advance toward consistent, reproducible assessment of data quality, practical barriers remain: running the BDQ code requires technical expertise and infrastructure, the raw outputs are difficult to interpret, and it can be hard to know which issues to prioritize for correction.
BDQEmail removes these barriers by letting users simply email a dataset (with occurrence or taxon core files) to bdqemail@gmail.com with no setup or coding required. The service runs the BDQ tests, analyzes the results with a large language model (LLM) and produces a clear, context-aware summary with prioritized recommendations.
Try it out and . Please post any issues or suggestions to our GitHub repository. Thank you for your feedback!
ChatIPT: Simplify Data Publishing with AI
ChatIPT won the Ebbe Nielsen award in 2024.
Calling all biologists, botanists, ecologists, students, researchers! If you’ve ever said “I’ll publish that dataset later,” ChatIPT is the “later.” Upload. Chat. Publish. Done. New version: chatipt.svc.gbif.no
It's a chatbot that harnesses the power of ChatGPT to standardize and publish biodiversity data to GBIF. ChatIPT transforms your Excel tables into Darwin Core (DwC) compatible formats effortlessly, preparing your datasets for publication. Currently, it publishes data to the GBIF test environment, so you can refine your datasets without concerns about premature public release.
If you encounter any issues or have suggestions, please report them on our GitHub repository: gbif-norway/ChatIPT. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve the service.
IPT
The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) is a free open source software tool written in Java that is used to publish and share biodiversity datasets through the GBIF network.
GBIF Excel template
GBIF currently supports four classes of datasets. GBIF Occurrence datasets provide evidence of the occurrence of a species (or other taxon) at a particular place on a specified date.
GBIF Excel template
GBIF sampling-event datasets typically derive from standard protocols for measuring and monitoring biodiversity like vegetation transects and freshwater or marine sampling.
Excel to Darwin Core Standard (DwC) tool (beta)
“Excel to Darwin Core Standard (DwC) tool” is a spreadsheet for DwC setup, data entry and data validation. The data can be exported to tab-text files for import in the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT)
Dataset portals
A simple portal for each of our datasets
Prototype - Currently unavailable
Visit the GBIF Portal for an overview of datasets from Norwegian data publishers .
Dugnad: Annotations & Transcriptions (v 2018)
Prototype - Currently unavailable
Citizen science portal for natural history label transcriptions
Coordinate conversion
Tools and services to convert coordinates between various formats (MGRS, UTM, DMS, decimal degrees). See blog post here for tips .
Currently unavailable
Crosstab data to list data converter
Often biodiversity data is in input in crosstab format when in the field. In order to publish this data, you will need to convert it into a flattened list. This is a small tool to help you do that.
Europeana data dump
The EU's Europeana project (see http://www.europeana.eu/ ) provides access to books, music, artworks, and other cultural objects housed in collections across Europe. In March 2017, GBIF Norway created Europeana-compatible XML data exports from several natural history collections, with the idea of including these in the Europeana project. In the end, these were not imported into Europeana, but the 2017 data dumps are still available and can be updated if requested.
