The use of the vast amount of data compiled by thousands of taxonomists from all over the world during the last two centuries is basic for scientific and applied purposes. The emergence and progress of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the development of technologies for the storage and access of primary biological data provide new opportunities for taxonomists. However, many taxonomists still have difficulty managing GIS technologies. The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT) application, among others, aims to deliver simple and easy to use online visualization tools to help taxonomists in the spatial representation of their biological data. The team devoted to developing the Geographic Platform Component of the EDIT application is assisting taxonomists by: 1) developing an easy-to-use web-application (MapViewer ) allowing displaying, analyzing and printing of georeferenced information directly from simple data sources. Planned features of the MapViewer application are the provision of print-quality maps (over 600dpi), depicting the probable location of both well- and poorly-surveyed regions, and a direct link to GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) online tools to plot data occurrences. 2) building generic mapping services (MapRest Services) providing distribution maps from a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Users may choose among a large range of symbolization parameters. To use these services, the user simply needs to construct the URLs and the MapRest Services generate a map with the selected features, symbolized as the user chooses. The current implementation only accepts TDWG regions (at all levels) as the distribution layers to be printed. MapRest Services can return an image or a file that can be used by a client-side webmapping application (like Openlayers). Point data can also be plotted from coordinates using MapRest Services. Some All Taxa Biodiversity Inventories (ATBI) sites like Mercantour/Alpi Marittime and Gemer are currently using it. Some EDIT dataportals using these tools to map taxa distributions are PalmWeb and Chichorieae These tools differ mainly in the degree to which human intervention is involved in handling the data. While EDIT MapViewer works with user data, EDIT MapRest Services accept feeds from other EDIT web services. However, these tools share the use of Open Source tools and can be easily linked. All the geo-software used is OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) compliant: Geoserver and MapServer provide map images, legends and scale bar. Openlayers lets users visualize and navigate this geographic information. The JQuery javascript framework and some of its plug-ins provide dynamic tools to the EDIT MapViewer user interface. On the server side, PHP interacts with PostGIS to upload point data, dynamically creates the legend and, when requested, performs spatial analysis on EDIT MapViewer. ImageMagick produces images in different formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, greyscale, etc.) and resolutions. http://edit.csic.es/geo/mapviewer/edit.html http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/trac/wiki/MapRestServiceApi http://atbi.eu/mercantour-marittime http://atbi.eu/gemer/ http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/dataportal/palmae/ http://dev.e-taxonomy.eu/dataportal/cichorieae/