Biodiversity databases are created to meet the needs of particular purpose or research topic. Depending on the biodiversity data stored, these databases vary in design, content, and are treated as separate units with their own customised administration.

After publishing the data in the form of scientific publication with a website, these data often remain hidden from public. Moreover, the publication or the website focuses on the data present in a single database. Biodiversity portals originate in the need of presenting all the available data at one place. They provide an overview of accessible data from one country or a wider research topic. The current trend leads researchers into creation of such portals, or contributing their data in order to reveal results of their researches. We aim to create Slovak biodiversity portal that would connect and present data from (not exclusively) Slovak databases.

Institute of Botany owns, hosts and manages several independent databases containing various types of data - nomenclature, herbarium and literature records, chromosome counts, and phytocenological relevés.

Nomenclature database stores complete information on plant names, both accepted ones and synonyms. Database DataFloS [4] collects information about the distribution of all groups of plants (cyanobacteria, algae, lichens, micro and macromycetes, vascular plants) from every available literature sources, manuscripts, and herbarium collections in Slovakia and abroad [9]. The Karyological database [7] of the ferns and flowering plants stores chromosome number records on all autochthonous and alochthonous species and hybrids of the ferns and flowering plants that are growing in wild in Slovakia, cultivated in Slovakia, or that are of unknown origin where the records were based on plant material obtained from the area of Slovakia [8]. The Central database of phytocenological relevés [3] gathers available phytocenological data from the area of Slovakia in order to process synoptic tables of all the vegetation types in this area; to create species groups; and to map the expansion of taxa.

The portal will be based on the concept of aggregation database. Data from all registered databases will be gathered by an aggregator into single generic database. From this point, the portal will be a simple web application getting data from one source. Compared to the so called real-time solution, when the data are fetched from all of the databases each time there is a request, the aggregation database provides a significant advantage in the speed of data retrieval. The drawback  of this approach is that the data will not be always up to date with individual databases, however with a reasonable and smart updating plan it is a small cost for improving user's comfort.

The problem of design differences will be solved by applying BioCASE Provider Software [2] on top of the databases. Experiences with this software convinced us that it is a fast and standardised way of publishing data. It serves as a middleware, provides a unified access interface to the databases, which relieves the aggregator component from dealing with each database individually. Such approach implies modularity which is another important property of the portal and its advantage is that more databases can be added later on without rewriting the code.

The presentation layer will take inspiration from existing foreign portals, such as Spanish Anthos [1] or Italian Flora Italiana [5]. It will provide a human interface in form of a website and computer interface in form of web  services. Plant distribution data will be connected with selected software for mapping plant distributions and will provide the tool for the distribution modelling applications. Finally, we expect that the Slovak plant diversity portal will be connected with the worldwide Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal (GBIF) [6].