I stumbled across this intriguing paper: The authors are arguing that there is scope for a unit of publication between a full-blown journal article (often not machine readable, but readable) and the nanopublication (a single, machine readable statement, not intended for people to read), namely the Single Figure Publications (SFP): It seems to me that this is something that the Biodiversity Data Journal is potentially heading towards.

Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files.