Italy is planning to set up its own BioCASe-based biodiversity network. Funded by the Ministry of Environment, in the first phase of the project several data providers will publish at least 1 million records. The BioCASe Provider Software will be used to feed specimen information from the data providers to a central node, which will then propagate the data to the BioCASe network and GBIF.
In order to build local BioCASe expertise, a hands-on workshop was held on March 2nd and 3rd in Rome. An overview on the architecure of biodiversity networks, the basic principles and the standards used was given. On the second day the participants installed their own BioCASe instance on local computers and configured the publication of a small collection database. Once working, they were used to set up a small, local biodiversity network with a prototypic data portal allowing a distributed query.