BioCASE

BioCASE stands for Biological Collection Access Service for Europe, this protocol enables a unified access to heterogeneous databases. One of the major users of this technology is GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which provides access to approximately 180 data providers that hold 870 collections which sum to 110,556,456 records.

BioCASE has been selected in the GCP because it provides a user interface and a protocol that allows data providers to wrap their databases to common standards in an easy way. The process of providing access through common schemas to the data held by the GCP providers will constitute a data abstraction layer, which will provide a common standard for exchanging data in the GCP network.

BioCASE is available as a provider software package, available for several operating systems. The latest version of the package can be downloaded from this site, which provides documentation, version history and requested features for future versions.