VertNet is a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation that aims to make biodiversity data free and openly accessible on the web from publishers worldwide.
Partners include the University of California Berkeley, the University of Colorado, Kansas University, and Tulane University, in collaboration with over 165 publishers representing 388 natural history and paleontological collections. The technical architecture is built on a scalable cloud-based platform using Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, the Integrated Publishing Toolkit, HTML5, and Carto. It's all open source on GitHub.
To learn more about VertNet, to become a VertNet publisher, or just to say hi, feel free to contact David or Laura. For technical questions about VertNet data architectures and platforms, or for coffee bribes, feel free to contact Aaron.