The Biografisch Portaal (Biography Portal) is an initiative based at the Huygens Institute for Dutch History in The Hague, with the aim of making biographical texts of the Netherlands more accessible.
The project was started in February 2010 with material for 40,000 digitized biographies, with the goal to grant digital access to all reliable information about (deceased) people of the Netherlands from the earliest beginnings of history up to modern times.[1]
The Netherlands as a geographic term includes former colonies, and the term "people" refers both to people born in the Netherlands and its former colonies, and also to people born elsewhere but active in the Netherlands and its former colonies. As of 2011, only biographical information about deceased people is included. The system used is based on the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative. Access to the Biografisch Portaal is available free through a web-based interface.
The project is a cooperative undertaking by ten scientific and cultural bodies in the Netherlands with the Huygens Institute as main contact. The other bodies are:
As of November 2011 the Biografisch Portaal contains 66,718 persons contained in 112,705 biographies.