The second mirror site of the GBIF Data Portal was opened last week at KISTI in Daejon, Republic of Korea. The project is been carried out by the management of the Korean GBIF Node.

Users of www.gbif.net are automatically redirected to the closest or most available mirror site. The Asian mirror is known on Internet as www.asia.gbif.net. However, users should bookmark only www.gbif.net, so that automatic redirection can work.

KISTI has made 3 Linux servers available for the project, which makes the site very fast. Therefore, the Asian mirror is normally first in line to serve all but European and African users. New and changed data from the indexing process in Copenhagen is being replicated in nearly real time to Daejon.

Three mirror sites are planned in the first phase of the project. The first mirror site was established in Berlin, Germany, in 2005. One more site will be set up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, in the coming months.