Bug fixing in the GBIF Data Portal

Despite our current efforts to develop a new Portal v2, our current data portal at data.gbif.org has not been left unattended. Bug fixes are being done periodically from feedback sent to us from our user community. In order to keep our community informed, this post will summarize the most important fixes and enhancements done in the past months:

• The data portal's main page now shows the total number of occurrence records with coordinates, along with the total count of records (non-georeferenced and georeferenced).

• Decimal coordinate searches were not working properly. When a user wanted to refine their coordinate searches to use decimals, the data portal was returning an erroneous count of occurrence records. Issue was fixed. Details here.

• Any feedback e-mail message sent from an occurrence or a taxon page now includes the original sender's email address in the CC field. Previously the sender's email address was not included in the feedback email, which represented a problem when the receiver replied to the email, but the sender never knew about the reply.

• The Taxon Web Service's GET operation was returning errors when trying to request some specific taxons. The problem was detected and fixed.

• On an occurrence detail page, when retrieving the original record from a data publisher, and the source data came from a Darwin Core Archive, it was not possible to retrieve a single record due to the single-file nature of a DwC Archive. (As opposed to a DiGIR request, in which you could extract just a single record). A fix was introduced so that the user can decide if he/she wants to download the complete archive (see an example).

• When using the data portal's Web Services to produce KML output, there were some problems when the generated KML contained HTML elements and Google Earth tried to open the file for visualization (This is a standard problem of XML). A small fix was introduced to escape the conflicting HTML inside the KML output.

• Other small GUI enhancements where also done.

Updates to the data portal's codebase is now done seldomly, but our goal is to fix any major issues that our user community reports. If you ever encounter problems, please don't hesitate to contact us at portal@gbif.org.