Global Names Index Help

The Global Names Index is the first component of a semantic environment for biology called the Global Names Architecture GNA). GNI has been developed by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Encyclopedia of Life. It has benefited from the ideas of an array of gifted and enthusiastic individuals who contributed through the Nomina workshops that they attended.

GNI was developed because of the central importance of the names of organisms in the management of data about organisms. The primary users of this site are not people, but other machines, so please don’t complain because the site is boring.

Many initiatives world-wide have been compiling and validating scientific names. They sit at the core of the management of information in most biodiversity web-sites and web-accessible databases. GNI is a response to foster the dynamic interactions among these initiatives. GNI itself is a fairly simple list of names, with reference to who holds the names, and links back to the sources of the names. It is the first module of GNA. New modules that appear will add nomenclatural authority and information to some of the names. Other services might, for example, return the correct versions of names that are submitted.

This is an open source development, the codebase is available under the MIT license, and the content is regarded as being in the public domain.

How to publish your scientific names list

How to access data by a script using API

Acknowledgments