The Florida Biotic Information Consortium (FBIC) facilitates and promotes the development of a statewide infrastructure to provide digital access to the wealth of distributed biotic information assets of Florida for its citizens and the wider community. This is accomplished by:

1. Identifying and adopting standards and best practices for data capture, exchange, and presentation to promote interoperability.

2. Identifying and/or creating authoritative references for populating descriptive fields, e.g., Florida gazetteer, thesaurus, taxonomic dictionaries. These authorities will be scalable, extensible, multilingual, and multidisciplinary.

3. Identifying the established crosswalks between metadata formats, e.g., MARC, FGDC, NBII, Darwin Core, Dublin Core.

4. Creating a Web site to record the progress and disseminate deliverables of the Consortium. This will be populated initially with the presentations given at the Georeferencing Florida workshop.

5. Incorporating all participants of the Georeferencing Florida workshop into the FBIC list to permit information exchange through email. Messages should be addressed FBIC-l@lists.ufl.edu

6. Developing a scalable pilot project that will allow convergent retrieval of disparate biotic assets. [Developing a scalable pilot project that will allow seamless retrieval from the metadata formats identified in #3 above.] This pilot will lead to the development of a robust search engine with geospatial query and visualization capabilities.

7. Planning a series of statewide workshops to demonstrate the efficacy of the pilot project, to encourage future participation, and to increase the recognition that biotic information is a state asset with attendant management responsibilities.

8. Using the pilot to seek stable funding from the State for the development of the Florida Digital Information Infrastructure FDII.