A fundamental constituent of a biodiversity observation network is the technological infrastructure that underpins it. The European Biodiversity Network project (EU BON) has been working with and improving upon pre-existing tools for data mobilization, sharing and description. This paper provides conceptual and practical advice for the use of these tools. Tools for managing metadata, occurrence data, and ecological data are reviewed and detailed description of these tools, their capabilities and limitations are given. Recommendations on their deployment and possible future enhancements are presented from the perspective of the needs of the biodiversity observation community with a view to the development of a unified user interface to these data – the European Biodiversity Portal (EBP). Steps taken to develop, adapt, deploy and test these tools are described. This document also gives an overview of the objectives that still need to be achieved and challenges to be addressed for the remainder of the project. informacion[at]ebd.csic.es: Smirnova et al (2016) Data sharing tools adopted by the European