I’m happy to let you all know that we recently opened access to a very early version of work which is underway on a new GBIF.org site.
It has limited functionality today, but we’ve tackled the most challenging issue which is cross content search. We’re also working on making a consistent search experience across the various content types GBIF deal with.
Some examples:
The menu structure is provisional now, as is the majority of the styling (much of which needs revision) but I hope this helps give a sense of the direction. We aim to have this near completion by the end of 2016.
There are several pages that have begun but are not ready yet, including the species detail page, and the country / participant pages.
There will also be a revision to maps to include (just demos with example styling here):
All of this work in the mapping API is to set GBIF up to implement the species trends for all species (currently demo’ed for Lepidoptera only):
[Maps are the only /v2 API change, and we’ll shortly document the changes and will also continue to support /v1 maps in the API. v2 maps have all basisOfRecord, multiple projections, year resolution, and hexagon binning and will be available as PNGs
and as Mapbox Vector Tile format]
Once those developments are included in a forthcoming release we’ll enable the feedback functions and then iterate over the developments releasing regularly with updates.
The work is on GitHub [1], and primarily developed in Node with AngluarJS using the GBIF APIs. We will be deploying all of this on HTTPS and are exploring HTTP2 now to increase performance.