BioCASE is a consortium of 34 centres with expertise in biodiversity research, biological collections, and biodiversity informatics. Members also form a complete network of country nodes. The service created will offer for the first time a concerted access to the immense science knowledge base embodied by European biological collections. An Internet access system, which uses metadata thesauri to link emerging networks and isolated collections will enable users to extract relevant information from constantly changing, highly heterogeneous and distributed base data of varying completeness, quality and depth. BioCASE will support ongoing taxonomic projects of the EU, provide an access point for voucher information underpinning large areas of environmental and biodiversity research, directly contribute to meet EU obligations under the CBD, and provide significant input to the global Biodiversity Information Facility. Remark: Not all the partners are mentioned here.