What you need to know about the NPT

The Nodes Portal Toolkit (NPT) is envisioned as a suite of informatics tools designed to help GBIF Participants to deploy, maintain and extend biodiversity data portals (at the national, regional or thematic levels). The GBIF Participant Node Managers Committee recommended in October 2009 to fully engage the nodes community in the development cycle of the NPT, especially to leverage the technical capacity available across the GBIF network.
Following this recommendation a technical advisory group with representatives from the Nodes Community was convened, and a workshop of this group held in Montreal, Canada, in December 2009 . This group provided specific guidance on 1) the overall scope for the NPT, 2) structure and components, and 3) development approach.
This group also recommended hiring an expert from the community to coordinate the NPT development (especially to serve as a liaison between the NPT end users, developers, strategic partners, the GBIF Secretariat, and the Nodes Committee, among others). The call for this position was issued in August 2010 , and a NPT Project Coordinator selected and appointed in October 2010 .
The NPT Project Coordinator setup an NPT Advisory Group workshop, which was held in Madrid in March 2011. It is an attempt to scope and capture the requirements of the NPT. The meeting was held in an interactive way and this document was drafted collaboratively by all participants to this meeting.
The Advisory Group is composed of the following persons: Cees Hof (GBIF-NL), David Remsen (GBIF-S), Douglas Hyde (NatureServe Canada), Francisco Pando (GBIF-ES), Frank Oguya (GBIF-KE), Guy Baillargeon (GBIF-CA), Maria Auxiliadora Mora (GBIF-CR), Mélianie Raymond (GBIF-S), Mihail-Constantin Carausu (GBIF-DK), Nabil Youdjou (GBIF-AQ), Nicolas Noé (GBIF-BE), Peter Desmet (Canadensys), Steve Wilkinson (GBIF-UK), Tim Robertson (GBIF-S), Wouter Addink (ETi). The NPT Project Coordinator (Bruno Danis, GBIF-AQ) and the GBIF Senior Programme Officer for Nodes (Juan Bello, GBIF-S) also attended the workshop.