About

The BioPortal is a website that serves as the national access portal for all information relating to natural history, from basic data about museum objects to fully illustrated species descriptions. Via a single website, BioPortal grants access to all digitized details of the Naturalis collections, using the Netherlands Biodiversity API (NBA). Per October 2017 already more than 8 Million objects  are included and the information is continuously extended. The NBA links the data to various digital sources of guaranteed scientific  quality. This allows to consult these data through one single website.

Via the NBA, BioPortal can access the following data sources

• Brahms: botanical specimen data at Naturalis;
• Naturalis Collectieregistragiesysteem (CRS): zoological, paleontological, mineralogical and petrological specimen data of Naturalis;
• Dutch Species Register: list and descriptions of all species that occur in the Netherlands;
• Catalogue of Life: index of names of all known species of the world

We call this collection of data the NDS: the Naturalis Data Store. The data is fed into this store through an ETL-process that harmonizes several different data formats into a single, ABCD-compatible document model.

The BioPortal reflects the strength of the NBA. It is effectively a ‘client’ of the NBA, an example application that delivers data from the NBA in an appealing manner, via a web portal. By means of this portal, anyone – from the interested amateur to the research scientist – can carry out full-text searches or simply graze through the data using specific fields and geographical locations.

Special Naturalis collections are highlighted in the portal, directly accessible in the section 'Explore highlights'.