For the last 10 years, SinBiota, the information system of the Biota-FAPESP Program, has served the community storing and displaying data in maps, and providing a common base for researchers in different areas to communicate and exchange biodiversity data. State administration has also used the system to support new laws and regulations. Now it is time to rethink the system, which has grown in an ad-hoc, unstructured way, aiming at the support that will be needed for the next 10 years.In a project jointly funded by Microsoft Research and FAPESP, we aim at the creation of a specification for the new SinBiota 2.0 system, including cutting-edge services and technologies on information technology, in order to achieve a number of goals, namely: guarantee the use and expansion of the system for the next ten years; support the availability of a larger volume of higher quality environmental data, oriented also to the educational and public administration sectors; provide more efficient sharing of data among BIOTA researchers; interoperate with international initiatives; provide effective tools to assist researchers in finding relevant information amongst a large amount of environment data. The expected results at the end of this project are the composition of a specification (Reference Document) of the SinBiota 2.0 system, and the implementation of a prototype that will gradually replace the current system.We propose in this work the system architecture and our vision of the main features that would allow SinBiota 2.0 to meet the expectations of the biodiversity research community and other stakeholders. We also describe a prototype application that implements most of the features present in the current SinBiota 1.0 system, as well as some of the new features envisaged for the new version.