Biodiversity core data and information constitutes an important source of knowledge for many disciplines. In order to facilitate access to this knowledge, technical and semantic interoperability barriers need to be addressed.The objectives of Pro-iBiosphere are, to: a) Coordinate towards and prepare the foundations for a long-term viable, evolving knowledge management, aggregation and integration platform needed to replace and improve the present system of taxonomic literature, especially as presented in Floras and Faunas; b) Provide new methods to synthesize distributed knowledge and a strategy to adapt methods of acquisition, curation, and dissemination of biodiversity data to the digital era; c) Help to align ongoing and forthcoming semantic mark up of taxonomic literature, and to link elements of biodiversity literature (ie. taxonomic treatments) to the original data, such as the individual observation record (being the essential foundation of any biodiversity information); d) Promote and monitor the development and adoption of common mark up standards and specifications for making biodiversity knowledge more accessible and re-usable; e) Provide the community with technical solutions for the enhancement and use of these data; f) Analyze and evaluate business models for supporting Open Science and provide recommendations to achieve sustainable delivery of biodiversity information to target audiences; g) Develop and agree on a shared data and IPR policy; h) Promote and increase cooperation between the major biodiversity projects, initiatives and platforms at EU and global levels.These activities will prepare the ground for an integrative system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge. A system that facilitates open access to taxonomic data is essential because it will allow a sustainable provision of high quality data to partners and users, including e-science infrastructure projects as well as global initiatives on biodiversity informatics.