1. GBIF Governing Board 20
12th Global Nodes Meeting
Overview of NPT Startup: current status, planned developments, user requirements
Break group 2
The goal of this session is to provide a quick overview of the NPT Startup, of the results of the review that was conducted a few months ago, and of the current experiences with the NPT Startup within the GBIF community. We also want to start to design a strategy for uptake and development.
Manuel Vargas
Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad de Costa Rica (INBio)
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
Sunday, October 6th, 2013

2. Contents Background. History. The NPT Startup.
Review of the current version.
Collaborative work and development: the concept demonstrated.
The way forward.

3. Background
About 43% of the Country Participants within GBIF do not have a web presence. First version of the NPT (Nodes Portal Toolkit) Startup is intended to fill this gap.
This could be a good place to mention NPT definition:
“The NPT is envisioned as a suite of informatics tools designed to help GBIF Participants to deploy, maintain and extend biodiversity data portals”
Do we have any update about this “43%”? In any case, do we know the date when this percentage was calculated?
Can we get some information about how the early adoption programme is going?
Based on a review of 58 Country Participants in total at the beginning of 2012

4. History
Over the course of 2012, GBIFS developed the core modules required for the first version.
NPT Startup 1.0 RC1 was made available in April 2013 and a review of it was conducted.
An ‘Early Adoption’ Programme was launched in August 2013.
Pre-release alpha (v1.0.0-alpha) was made available in September 2013.
Pre-release beta (v1.0.0-beta) is available since October 1st 2013.
GBIFS and some Nodes continue working to improve NPT Startup based on requests made by GBIF Participant Nodes Community.
The idea here is to show that NPT Startup is “a living thing”.
How is the Early Adoption Programme going?

5. NPT Startup at GitHub

6. NPT Startup installation

7. Wiki

8. Tracking of issues

9. NPT Startup

10. NPT Startup

11. Review of the first version of NPT Startup
Conducted from 9 April to 20 May 2013 amongst all GBIF Node Managers and staff.
40 Participant Nodes responded.
Majority of the respondents to the review are quite positive about the current version of NPT Startup:
About 50% of the respondents indicated their desire to use the tool in its current form.
The majority of the responding Nodes considered this version to be very useful to extremely useful.
Nevertheless, respondents suggest some additional essential functionality to improve the NPT Startup.
Which is the current version of NPT Startup? RC1, 1.0?

12. NPT is a web site construction platform
Drupal and Scratchpads provide a base framework that has been used to develop NPT.
= NPT
The role of Drupal and Scratchpads has to be presented in this graphic.

13. NPT can be extended by creating and extending modules

14. Nodes can participate in development of NPT
A module we all need
A module I need

15. Towards NPT Startup 1.0
Improvements should address the following suggested additional features:
Branding and identity.
Communication and support of Nodes activities.
Localization and languages.
Mapping.
Some Nodes are already customizing and improving NPT Startup for their sites and projects.
This slide is based on “NPT Startup Review Secretariats Response”

16. Benin – Costa Rica JRS sponsored project
Digitized information:
50000 occurrence records.
3000 species records.
10000 images.
NPT Startup has been extended to implement a portal for Benin that includes the following additional features:
Importing of local datasets.
Visualization, querying, and mapping of occurrence data.
Species records module based on Plinian Core Standard.
French translation.

17. Importing of local datasets

18. Occurrence data (http://npt.inbio.ac.cr/)

19. Occurrence data (http://npt.inbio.ac.cr/)

20. Species records (http://npt.inbio.ac.cr/)

21. The way forward
How can we build a network of collaboration and development around NPT?
What kind of resources could be provided by the Nodes and which ones could be supplied by GBIFS?
Subjects to consider:
Hosting.
Internationalization.
Documentation.
Programming standards.
Performance.

22. The way forward What kind of tool do we want?
A simple one for Nodes with none or limited web presence?
A more complex one with more advanced functionality but maybe more difficult to manage?
How can we combine NPT with other related developments (e.g. IPT)?

23. Thank you!