GBIF hosted portals

Context

Participant nodes play an essential role in promoting the use of biodiversity data mobilized by the GBIF network. To further support their engagement across national, institutional, regional and thematic levels, the GBIF Secretariat has developed a fully hosted service that provides simple, customizable biodiversity data portals to GBIF Participant nodes and their partners. In addition to nodes using hosted portals as their own national or network portals, nodes can offer hosted portals as a service to data publishers in their networks.

Each hosted portal is a simple website hosted and maintained on the GBIF infrastructure. The programme complements other tools available through the network by lowering the technical threshold for maintaining a branded web presence displaying a targeted subset of the data and information already available through GBIF.org.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you should be able to perform the following:

  • Describe the hosted portal programme

  • Describe the technologies used in the hosted portal programme

  • Describe how hosted portals can be used as a tool to engage the community

  • Explore portal examples

  • Plan a hosted portal (group 1)

  • Create a hosted portal (group 2)

  • Add features to a hosted portal (group 3)

Trainers

The following trainers have developed the content for this topic:

Anabela Plos, Node Manager, Argentina

Carole Sinou, Node Manager, Canadensys

Secretariat consultants: Mélianie Raymond and Morten Høfft

Preparation

Complete the following activities to prepare for the onsite sessions:

  1. Explore the hosted portal programme page.

  2. Explore 2-3 portals. Choose amongst the full list of portals in production. Take note of features that you like.

  3. Share a slide if you have participated in the GBIF Hosted Portal programme.

Discover GBIF Hosted Portals

Introduction to the GBIF hosted portals programme

This presentation will introduce you to GBIF hosted portals. You’ll learn about the history of the programme and how portals can be used as a tool to engage communities. Additionally, you’ll learn about the technologies upon which the portals are built.

 

 

CESP Project Resource

This best practice guide is an outcome of GBIF CESP PROJECT 2023-010.

A Best Practices Guide on how to make national portals address national challenges

Portals showcase

Please review the examples shared by nodes on their hosted portals.

 

 

Portal scavenger hunt

During this activity, you will explore different hosted portals to discover various layouts, widgets, and ways to connect to the community. Search for specific information in occurrence, collection, dataset widgets, and in specific pages.

Answers may be found in the various hosted portals in production.

We will use Mentimeter to capture your team answers and share them back with all the participants. Work in teams of two to three within your larger groups.

There will be prizes!

Enter the answers in your browser or on your phone using the QR code.

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Hands-on activities for hosted portals

Group 1

Report to Classroom H-404.

The Group 1 participants will complete a storyboarding activity to conceptually design a hosted portal based on an example use case.

 

 

Instructions

  1. Create a group of 2-3 people.

  2. Choose a use case (museum, country Node, research group).

  3. Discuss what type of portal would be the best suited to the use case.

    1. Who is the audience/user community for the portal?

    2. What is the data scope?

    3. Will you need to support multiple languages?

  4. Create a mockup on paper - consider which pages or features to include, possible layouts, etc.

  5. At the end of the exercise, teams will be invited to present their creation and explain their choices.

Group 2

Report to Classroom H-205.

The Group 2 participants will begin to build out their new portals. The main objectives are to create a homepage, a navigation page, a static page, and set the scope for the data section.

Tasks

A simple prose page

  • Create a new page

  • Write the frontmatter

  • Determine how the url defined - directory/filename or permalink

  • A title, description, image, imagelicense

  • Change layout

  • Optional: add languages for multilingual sites

  • Write some text in markdown

Customize the homepage with various blocks

This is typically done for a few special pages like the home page and perhaps a few other landing pages.

  • Start by changing the layout and add a hero header block

  • Select 3 blocks (you can see them on the demo theme site) and add content for them

Customize the widgets

Advanced and typically only done once. The Secretariat can help with this, but it is nice to know where it exists and roughly how it works.

  • Change the occurrence data scope - predicate

  • Select which data entities to show - and how to configure them and how to add required md pages

  • Add a custom contact for feedback

  • Change default occurrence map position and zoom level

Group 3

Report to Classroom H-205.

The Group 3 participants will have an opportunity to discussed advanced features they’d like to add/customize on their portals. There will be opportunties to interact with Informatics staff and fellow portal peers.

Action plan

The trainers will conclude the topic and offer an action plan for you to reflect on this topic post-training.