Distributed System Of Scientific Collections Research Articles

Permits, contracts and their terms for biodiversity specimens

We present two different typologies of legal/contractual information in the context of natural history objects: the Biodiversity Permit/Contract Typology categorises permits and contracts, and the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms for Biodiversity Specimens categorises the terms within permits and contracts. The Typologies have been developed under the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project with the participation of experts from outside the consortium. The document further addresses a possible technical integration of these typologies into the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo). The implementation in the DiSSCo data model is outlined and a concrete use case is presented to show how conditions, e.g. the Typology of Legal/Contractual Terms, can be introduced into the DiSSCo Electronic Loans and Visits System (ElViS). Finally, we give an outlook on the next steps to develop the typologies into a standard that supports compliance with legal and contractual obligations within the wider community of natural science collections.

A report on recommendations for the most suitable financial contribution model for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections Research Infrastructure (DiSSCo-RI)

A key consideration during the preparatory phase project DiSSCo Prepare – which laid the foundations for the future Research Infrastructure DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) – was the need to establish a small number of alternative viable financial contribution models and a scalable formula which could be presented to potential funders, with a view to obtaining the minimum financial contribution necessary for DiSSCo to operate, as well as considering how the RI could grow with increased national funding. This report briefly explains the ERIC funding framework – as chosen for DiSSCo – and its legal constraints, in order to explain the key role played by national member contributions in the viability of an ERIC. An essential annex of the statutes that will be signed by all members of the ERIC is the member fee calculation. A proposal for the DiSSCo member fee calculation is set out in this document and is based on three main indicators: economic power (GDP), annual spending in research and development and population size. In the context of DiSSCo – and to ensure the ERIC can function – these indicators are connected to a fixed baseline fee of €50,000, in order to guarantee a minimum significant annual contribution from each participating country and avoid contributions that will be more expensive to manage than to benefit from. This baseline is multiplied by contribution factors which propose different ways to weight the various indicators. The method is established on an ideal scenario, whereby all 27 EU members, as well as the UK, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland sign the DiSSCo statutes and agree to the proposed member contribution calculation, amounting to €4.5 million for the annual budget of the ERIC. This scenario remains highly unlikely; therefore, a scaled approach has been envisaged, meaning the initial engagement of some countries will allow DiSSCo to begin its operation and implement its business strategy, whilst the growth of the ERIC and its activities is likely to evolve proportionally to the number of national members it is able to engage. This report also looks at the ways in which funding could be distributed amongst the DiSSCo members in order to implement decentralised services.

DiSSCo Transition Abridged Grant Proposal

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative. DiSSCo aims to bring together natural science collections from 175 museums, botanical gardens, universities and research institutes across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that makes these collections physically and digitally open and accessible for all forms of research and innovation. DiSSCo RI entered the ESFRI roadmap in 2018 and successfully concluded its Preparatory Phase in early 2023. The RI is now transitioning towards the constitution of its legal entity (an ERIC) and the start of its scaled-up construction (implementation) programme. This publication is an abridged version of the successful grant proposal for the DiSSCo Transition Project which has the goal of ensuring the seamless transition of the DiSSCo RI from its Preparatory Phase to the Construction Phase (expected to start in 2025). In this transition period, the Project will address five objectives building on the outcomes of the Preparatory Phase project: 1) Advance the DiSSCo ERIC process and complete its policy framework, ensuring the smooth early-phase Implementation of DISSCo; 2) Engage & support DiSSCo National Nodes to strengthen national commitments; 3) Advance the development of core e-services to avoid the accumulation of technical debt before the start of the Implementation Phase; 4) Continue international collaboration on standards & best practices needed for the DiSSCo service provision; and 5) Continue supporting DiSSCo RI interim governance bodies and transition them to the DiSSCo ERIC formal governance. The Project’s impact will be measured against the increase in the RI's overall Implementation Readiness Level (IRL). More specifically, we will monitor its impact towards reaching the required level of maturity in four of the five dimensions of the IRL that can benefit from further developments. These include the organisational, financial, technological and data readiness levels.

Distributed Team Working - Approaches for DiSSCo

As a highly decentralised research infrastructure, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) will need to develop cross-institutional teams, adopting work practices where individual staff are intensively working collectively on common tasks in a distributed environment. These flexible and distributed working practices will be essential to the delivery of the research infrastructure across a wide range of delivery partners and a geographically dispersed set of scarce resources and skills, particularly in more technical roles. Since work to consider secondment and distributed working in DiSSCo was first envisaged, there has been a step change in distributed working owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns or other restrictions to where work could take place. This report examines distributed team working practices and how they have changed, through interviews with a range of key roles across DiSSCo Prepare institutions. It briefly examines key project management and technical team delivery techniques. It documents how some of these approaches have been piloted within DiSSCo Prepare for the development, testing and delivery of DiSSCo Policy and Digital Maturity tools. Finally, bringing this together with previous work on secondment policies and practices for DiSSCo, we make recommendations about how secondment and distributed team working can be approached to enhance DiSSCo capabilities and the likelihood of successful implementation of the research infrastructure.

Digitisation of natural history collections: criteria for prioritisation

There are approximately 1.5 billion specimens kept in European Natural History Collections. The mission for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is to unite all these specimens into a one-stop e-science infrastructure of digital specimens. This is a monumental digitisation task and criteria for how to prioritise this effort are, therefore, crucial for the success of the project. In this report, we have reviewed the literature and designed and conducted surveys of the digitisation plans and criteria used by DiSSCo Partners to understand the prioritisation criteria used in the digitisation of natural history collections. As an attempt to provide some guidance for the digitisation of specimens, we suggest that an organisation (e.g. DiSSCo or an individual institution) that is planning to digitise natural history collections considers four categories of prioritisation criteria: Relevance, Data quality, Cost and Feasibility.

DiSSCo Prepare Project: Increasing the Implementation Readiness Levels of the European Research Infrastructure

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for Natural Science Collections. The DiSSCo RI aims to create a new business model for one European collection that digitally unifies all European natural science assets under common access, curation, policies and practices that ensure that all the data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles). DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanic gardens and collection-holding institutions in the world. DiSSCo entered the European Roadmap for Research Infrastructures in 2018 and launched its main preparatory phase project (DiSSCo Prepare) in 2020. DiSSCo Prepare is the primary vehicle through which DiSSCo reaches the overall maturity necessary for its construction and eventual operation. DiSSCo Prepare raises DiSSCo’s implementation readiness level (IRL) across the five dimensions: technical, scientific, data, organisational and financial. Each dimension of implementation readiness is separately addressed by specific Work Packages (WP) with distinct targets, actions and tasks that will deliver DiSSCo’s Construction Masterplan. This comprehensive and integrated Masterplan will be the product of the outputs of all of its content related tasks and will be the project’s final output. It will serve as the blueprint for construction of the DiSSCo RI, including establishing it as a legal entity. DiSSCo Prepare builds on the successful completion of DiSSCo’s design study, ICEDIG and the outcomes of other DiSSCo-linked projects such as SYNTHESYS+ and MOBILISE. This paper is an abridged version of the original DiSSCo Prepare grant proposal. It contains the overarching scientific case for DiSSCo Prepare, alongside a description of our major activities.

I Know Something You Don’t Know: The annotation saga continues…

Over the past 20 years, the biodiversity informatics community has pursued components of the digital annotation landscape with varying degrees of success. We will provide an historical overview of the theory, the advancements made through a few key projects, and will identify some of the ongoing challenges and opportunities. The fundamental principles remain unchanged since annotations were first proposed. Someone (or something): (1) has an enhancement to make elsewhere from the source where original data or information are generated or transcribed; (2) wishes to broadcast these statements to the originator and to others who may benefit; and (3) expects persistence, discoverability, and attribution for their contributions alongside the source. The Filtered Push project (Morris et al. 2013) considered several use cases and pioneered development of services based on the technology of the day. The exchange of data between parties in a universally consistent way necessitated the development of a novel draft standard for data annotations via an extension of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Annotation Working Group standard (Sanderson et al. 2013) to be sufficiently informative for a data curator to confidently make a decision. Figure 2 from Morris et al. (2013), reproduced here as Fig. 1, outlines the composition of an annotation data package for a taxonomic identification. The package contains the data object(s) associated with an occurrence, an expression of the motivation(s) for updating, some evidence for an assertion, and a stated expectation for how the receiving entity should take action. The Filtered Push and Annosys (Tschöpe et al. 2013) projects also considered implementation strategies involving collection management systems (e.g., Symbiota) and portals (e.g., European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy, EDIT). However, there remain technological barriers for these systems to operate at scale, the least of which is the absence of globally unique, persistent, resolvable identifiers for shared objects and concepts. Major aggregation infrastructures like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) rely on data enhancement to improve the quality of their resources and have annotation services in their work plans. More recently, the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) concept (Hardisty et al. 2022) will rely on annotation services as key components of the proposed infrastructure. Recent work on annotation services more generally has considered various new forms of packaging and delivery such as Frictionless Data (Fowler et al. 2018), Journal Article Tag Suite XML (Agosti et al. 2022), or nanopublications (Kuhn et al. 2018). There is risk in fragmentation of this landscape and disenfranchisement of both biological collections and the wider research community if we fail to align the purpose, content, and structure of these packages or if these fail to remain aligned with FAIR principles. Institutional collection management systems currently represent the canonical data store that provides data to researchers and data aggregators. It is critical that information and/or feedback about the data they release be round-tripped back to them for consideration. However, the sheer volume of annotations that could be generated by both human and machine curation processes will overwhelm local data curators and the systems supporting them. One solution to this is to create a central annotation store with write and discovery services that best support the needs of all stewards of data. This will require an international consortium of parties with a governance and technical model to assure its sustainability.

Connecting the Dots: Aligning human capacity through networks toward a globally interoperable Digital Extended Specimen (DES) infrastructure

Thanks to substantial support for biodiversity data mobilization in recent decades, billions of occurrence records are openly available, documenting life on Earth and enabling timely research, awareness raising, and policy-making. Initiatives across local to global scales have been separately funded to serve different, yet often overlapping audiences of data users, and have developed a variety of platforms and infrastructures to meet the needs of these audiences. The independent progress of biodiversity data providers has led to innovations as well as challenges for the community at large as we move towards connecting and linking a diversity of information from disparate sources as Digital Extended Specimens (DES). Recognizing a need for deeper and more frequent opportunities for communication and collaboration across the globe, an ad-hoc group of representatives of various international, national, and regional organizations have been meeting virtually since 2020 to provide a forum for updates, announcements, and shared progress. This group is provisionally named International Partners for the Digital Extended Specimen (IPDES), and is guided by these four concepts: Biodiversity, Connection, Knowledge and Agency. Participants in IPDES include representatives of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA), Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), National Specimen Information Infrastructure of China (NSII), and South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), as well as individuals involved with biodiversity informatics initiatives, natural science collections, museums, herbaria, and universities. Our global partners group strives to increase representation from around the globe as we aim to enable research that contributes to novel discoveries and addresses the societal challenges leading to the biodiversity crisis. Our overarching mission is to expand on the community-driven successes to connect biodiversity data and knowledge through coordination of a globally integrated network of stakeholders to enable an extensible technical and social infrastructure of data, tools, and working practices in support of our vision. The main work of our group thus far includes publishing a paper on the Digital Extended Specimen (Hardisty et al. 2022), organizing and hosting an array of activities at conferences, and asynchronous online work and forum-based exchanges. We aim to advance discussion on topics of broad interest to our community such as social and technical capacity building, broadening participation, expanding social and data networks, improving data models and building a backbone for the DES, and identifying international funding solutions. This presentation will highlight some of these activities and detail progress towards a roadmap for the development of the human network and technical infrastructure necessary to support the DES. It provides an opportunity for feedback from and engagement by stakeholder communities such as TDWG and other initiatives with a focus on data standards and biodiversity informatics, as we solidify our plans for the future in support of integrated and interconnected biodiversity data and credit for those doing the work.

Ten Simple Rules for Designing and Building a FAIR Research Infrastructure

One of the key priorities of The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) is to build sustainable and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) infrastructures. However, designing and building such infrastructures requires careful consideration of various factors, such as data interoperability, operational sustainability, and governance. This poster proposes ten simple rules, inspired by Ten Simple Rules for scientific research, for designing and building a research infrastructure drawing from existing initiatives particularly from experiences in preparation of DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) – a new research infrastructure that was in the ESFRI 2018 roadmap. While these rules are not comprehensive, they highlight a few essential traits that can be applied across different disciplines. For each rule, we highlight how within DiSSCo we accomplished the specific aspect.

Harmonised Data is Actionable Data: DiSSCo’s solution to data mapping

Predictability is one of the core requirements for creating machine actionable data. The better predictable the data, the more generic the service acting on the data can be. The more generic the service, the easier we can exchange ideas, collaborate on initiatives and leverage machines to do the work. It is essential for implementing the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible), as it provides the “I” for Interoperability (Jacobsen et al. 2020). The FAIR principles emphasise machine actionability because the amount of data generated is far too large for humans to handle. While Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) standards have massively improved the standardisation of biodiversity data, there is still room for improvement. Within the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), we aim to harmonise all scientific data derived from European specimen collections, including geological specimens, into a single data specification. We call this data specification the open Digital Specimen (openDS). It is being built on top of existing and developing biodiversity information standards such as Darwin Core (DwC), Minimal Information Digital Specimen (MIDS), Latimer Core, Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) Schema, Extension for Geosciences (EFG) and also on the new Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Unified Model. In openDS we leverage the existing standards within the TDWG community but combine these with stricter constraints and controlled vocabularies, with the aim to improve the FAIRness of the data. This will not only make the data easier to use, but will also increase its quality and machine actionability. As the first step towards this the harmonisation of terms, we make sure that similar values use the same term in a standard as key. This enables the next step in which we harmonise the values. We can transform free-text values into standardised or controlled vocabularies. For example: instead of using the names J. Doe, John Doe and J. Doe sr. for a collector, we aim to standardise these to J. Doe, with a person identifier that connects this name with more information about the collector. Biodiversity information standards such as DwC were developed to lower the bar for data sharing. The downside of including minimal restraints and flexibility is that they provide room for ambiguity, leading to multiple ways of interpretation. This limits interoperability and hampers machine actionability. In DiSSCo, data will come from different sources that use different biodiversity information standards. To cover this, we need to harmonise terms between these standards. To complicate things further, different serialisation methods are used for data exchange. Darwin Core Archives (DwC-A; GBIF 2021) use Comma-separated values (CSV) files. ABCD(EFG) exposed through Biological Collection Access Service (BioCASe) uses XML. And most custom formats use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). In this lightning talk, we will dive into DiSSCo’s technical implementation of the harmonisation process. DiSSCo currently supports two biodiversity information standards, DwC and ABCD(EFG), and maps the data to our openDS specification on a record-by-record basis. We will highlight some of the more problematic mappings, but also show how a harmonised model massively simplifies generic actions, such as the calculation of MIDS levels, which provide information about digitisation completeness of a specimen. We will conclude by having a quick look at the next steps and hope to start a discussion about controlled vocabularies. The development of high quality, standardised data based on a strict specification with controlled vocabularies, rooted in community accepted standards, can have a huge impact on biodiversity research and is an essential step towards scaling up research with computational support.

Modelling Research Expeditions in Wikidata: Best Practice for Standardisation and Contextualisation

Expeditions and other collecting events are a major source of objects in natural history museums (e.g., Mesibov 2021). Historically, these trips were often transdisciplinary: biological and Earth science specimens were collected at the same time as ethnological or anthropological objects. As a result, specimens and other material gathered during the same expedition, as well as the related data and metadata, are often distributed across multiple institutions. Many expeditions were driven by colonial agendas, aiming to discover new resources to exploit, and their findings were seldom shared with the source countries and local people. Understanding these expeditions illuminates the colonial origins of museum collections, and contributes to recognizing and addressing their impacts (e.g., Das and Lowe 2018, Ashby and Machin 2021). Research expeditions continue to contribute to natural history collections. There is a need to link historical or contemporary research expeditions to other entities, requiring the unambiguous labelling (and persistent identifiers) of such events. Stable identifiers for expeditions plus the sharing of metadata and descriptions in a wide range of languages will facilitate access to scattered information about the event, the institutions housing specimens and objects, the participants and the locations visited, and assist with the linking of distributed material and related research data. However, structured data for scientific expeditions are currently lacking. While identifier systems have been created for many entities over the last few decades, there is no dedicated identifier for research expeditions and similar events. Several studies have shown the importance of people identifiers for linking collection data (e.g., Groom et al. 2022), and we argue the same is true for expeditions. Wikidata is a multilingual community-curated knowledge base containing data structured in a human- and machine-readable format. It allows easy creation, updating and enriching of items on expeditions, and provides stable identifiers for them that can be used in collection management systems. Expeditions can be linked to participants and other agents, regions, localities, objects, archival material, maps, publications, field notebooks, documentary footage and art works resulting from the expeditions, thus making historical information more easily accessible and assisting with the acknowledgment of any imperial or colonial impact that may have resulted from the expedition. Expeditions in Wikidata can be hierarchical, e.g., linking a series of related events or under an umbrella project together providing a machine-readable way to harvest all project data. Wikidata also can provide links between present day countries and historical names for locations (e.g., former colonial names). Expeditions published as Linked Open Data make datasets more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and are also useful in data transcription and validation processes. Visualisation of itinerary data and travel routes also facilitate data quality checks. An informal working group of people interested in the topic was formed to discuss standards and share best practices and recommendations regarding terminology, data modelling and contextualisation. Building upon previous work (e.g., Bauer et al. 2022, von Mering et al. 2022, Leachman 2023), we aim to work towards the enrichment, linking and standardisation of data about research expeditions. If the Wikidata identifiers of these expeditions and participants are added to the records of the corresponding entities in the collection management system, institutions can link from their own collection metadata to the relations made in Wikidata, including to collections in other institutions. The participants of the expedition can be further linked to specimens gathered during the expedition with the use of tools, such as Bionomia, which can facilitate data round-tripping between these collections and specimen records, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Wikidata (Shorthouse 2020). Other initiatives such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) are also interested in incorporating these identifiers as links and annotations.

Planning the Migration to a New Database: Implications for the Collections of Meise Botanic Garden

Established in 1796, the Meise Botanic Garden has undergone multiple changes in nationality, name, focus, and locations. These changes have impacted its herbarium, living collections, and associated data. The way specimens are filed in the herbarium varies according to specimen type, taxonomic group and historical importance. Pragmatic solutions were used in the past for dealing with the divergent collections and their users' specific needs. There are at least 15 filing systems used at the Botanic Garden at present. In 2015, funding facilitated the digitization of 1.2 million herbarium specimens. A follow-on project in 2018 digitzed another 1.4 million specimens. Together with other initiatives, like the Global Plants Initiative, we have more than 2.7 million imaged specimens, representing about 77% of our herbarium collections. Of the imaged specimens, 89% have minimal data (barcode, species name, collector(s), collector number, collection date, country and locality), while the remaining 11% still need the metadata captured from the scanned images (mostly being done through the crowdsourcing project DoeDat). In 2023, a call to tender was started for a new Collection Management System (CMS) as part of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) Flanders*1 project. This call for tender was compiled in consultation with various natural history institutions, botanic gardens and museums in Belgium. At present, we are in the process of evaluating the various tenders. As part of the preparation to migrate the data from our present database to the new database, data gaps are being filled and data is being cleaned where possible. This will facilitate the migration from one system to another. This is particularly important for fields relating to taxonomy, countries and collectors, as these have implications for the physical location of specimens in the herbarium. In the past months, much time has been dedicated to linking specimens to the taxon table. At present fewer than 0.6% of specimens with a filing name (the scientific name under which the specimen is filed in the herbarium cupboards) remain to be linked to the taxon table. The use of the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service helped to resolve some of the issues associated with unlinked names. Many of the remaining unlinked names are names of infraspecific taxa (which are not yet in the taxon table), orthographic variations, or names of commercial cultivars or hybrids. However, this does not include the 11% of the specimens without data mentioned above. The number of specimens lacking a country code is 7%. The African Herbarium, which represents about a third of the specimens at the Botanic Garden, is sorted according to species, country and collector. Resolving missing country codes would facilitate the curatorial process for this collection. Likewise, 6% of specimen data only have collectors as free-text that still needs to be linked to the standardised collectors table. Atomizing and linking these collector strings would also ease the migration to a new CMS. In 2015, a master plan was also drawn up for the physical renovation of the Garden, including the herbarium's infrastructure. Work on the herbarium is planned for 2025, but is contingent on funding. The CMS will form a crucial part of this move as specimens will be reclassified. As is mentioned above, there are several classification systems used at the Botanic Garden. The African and Belgian collections currently follow Mabberley (1997) for angiosperms. This system is no longer up-to-date, and we are considering moving to APG IV (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) system for flowering plants. For example, the 213 genera present at the Botanic Garden for the family Liliaceae sensu lato (Mabberley 1997) would resolve to 24 families in APG IV. As the specimens are arranged alphabetically by family and genus, this would mean a significant physical reorganization of specimens. The CMS will also be used to track the movement of the various collections. Once the new CMS has been chosen, we will have a better idea of what needs to be done in order to facilitate data migration. For example, linking our taxonomic names to external sources using their permanent identifiers (e.g., World Flora Online, International Plant Names Index, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Index Fungorum, MycoBank, World Register of Marine Species) would allow us to track and maintain taxonomic changes more easily in the future. Importing the various permanent identifiers into our current database would be prone to inconsistencies as the existing fields are not fit for the purpose. A possible solution would be to manage this data externally and import them into the new CMS. A similar approach could be followed with collectors and Wikidata permanent identifiers. We hope to develop a pragmatic approach with practical solutions.

On a BiCIKL to Wikidata: Harmonizing the chaotic universe of natural history collectors

People play a key role in science and have been getting increased recognition for this work, initially by the efforts of libraries to harmonize attribution of authors of creative works, such as in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Now, in the realm of scientific publishing, the international ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) organization allows scientists to mint globally unique and self-maintained identifiers for themselves, which tie all of their scientific output together. This has been fairly successful for formal publications, but less so for other scientific contributions, such as samples or specimens collected from organisms to serve as vouchers or references for long-term study. Such specimens may end up in natural history collections, where their metadata and, in particular, their taxonomic identity is refined over the years by experts. As the cost of digitization has decreased and the methods become more refined, digital versions of these specimens are now being published online in vast numbers, making attribution with identifiers such as ORCID easier. However, many of these specimens are only linked to the people who worked on them by name strings, often using a variety of syntaxes, transliterations and abbreviations. Recently, some collections have made an effort to disambiguate these names by enriching them with an explicit link to a persistent identifier, such as an ORCID (Groom et al. 2022, Little et al. 2022, von Mering et al. 2022, Meeus et al. 2023). In the European Union-funded BiCIKL (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge) project, one of the goals is to develop better workflows that aid and streamline this enrichment process. This approach focuses primarily on Wikidata, as a fall-back resource for cases where ORCID identifiers are not available. Wikidata is suitable for people who are unable to register for an ORCID identifier, but also acts as a broker to harmonize between other authority sources such as the fore-mentioned VIAF. In this presentation, we will show the results achieved so far in this BiCIKL effort. First, we will provide a landscape analysis of different person identifier enrichment efforts so far in the natural history sector. Infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the related Bionomia and the Botany Pilot (Güntsch et al. 2021) will play a key role. Building on those results, we will identify improved methods to link name strings to unique biographical records in resources such as Wikidata and ORCID. The focus will primarily be on properties of these records that make them more identifiable as collectors of specimens, and that can systematically be harnessed to rank multiple possible candidates or reject false positives. Finally, these findings will be incorporated into workflows that streamline the disambiguation and enrichment process. These workflows will build on existing pipelines and platforms, such as Bionomia and the Botany Pilot, focusing in particular on data roundtripping from these resources into other infrastructures, such as local collection management systems, but also specimen data aggregators such as GBIF and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo).

DiSSCo Prepare Project: Increasing the Implementation Readiness Levels of the European Research Infrastructure

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for Natural Science Collections. The DiSSCo RI aims to create a new business model for one European collection that digitally unifies all European natural science assets under common access, curation, policies and practices that ensure that all the data is easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR principles). DiSSCo represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanic gardens and collection-holding institutions in the world. DiSSCo entered the European Roadmap for Research Infrastructures in 2018 and launched its main preparatory phase project (DiSSCo Prepare) in 2020. DiSSCo Prepare is the primary vehicle through which DiSSCo reaches the overall maturity necessary for its construction and eventual operation. DiSSCo Prepare raises DiSSCo’s implementation readiness level (IRL) across the five dimensions: technical, scientific, data, organisational and financial. Each dimension of implementation readiness is separately addressed by specific Work Packages (WP) with distinct targets, actions and tasks that will deliver DiSSCo’s Construction Masterplan. This comprehensive and integrated Masterplan will be the product of the outputs of all of its content related tasks and will be the project’s final output. It will serve as the blueprint for construction of the DiSSCo RI, including establishing it as a legal entity. DiSSCo Prepare builds on the successful completion of DiSSCo’s design study, ICEDIG and the outcomes of other DiSSCo-linked projects such as SYNTHESYS+ and MOBILISE. This paper is an abridged version of the original DiSSCo Prepare grant proposal. It contains the overarching scientific case for DiSSCo Prepare, alongside a description of our major activities.

Biodiversity of Bulgaria: Characteristics, protection and trends

Bulgaria is a medium-sized country located in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula. It hosts a rich mycota, flora and fauna, and quite well preserved natural and semi-natural ecosystems. This is mostly due to the country's geographic position between the temperate and subtropical zones, the complex geological history, and the big topographic variety. The high species diversity and endemism determine the high conservation value of Bulgarian biodiversity. The Bulgarian flora consist of more than 4,100 species, including more than 45 species of ferns, 250 species of mosses, and 2,800 higher plant species. The animals established in the country belong to 28 phyla and 75 classes. Vertebrates (858 species) comprise 2.7% of the Bulgarian fauna: 242 fishes and fish-like taxa; 24 amphibians; 40 reptiles; 452 birds; and 101 mammal species. Invertebrates account for more than 31,000 species. Over the past 25 years the number of known animals in the country has increased by over 4,500 species: from 29,000 in 1996 to 33,545 species in 2020. The total number of endemic animals is about 1,400 (4.2%). In some groups, the percentage of endemism is very high (95.5% of snails from the family Hydrobiidae and 71% of Clausiliidae; 53.6% of Diplopoda; 50.0% of terrestrial Isopoda). The richest endemic areas in Bulgaria are mostly in the mountains: Rila Mt.- 268, Pirin Mt. - 220, Western Stara Planina Mt. - 184, Western Rhodopes Mts - 183, and the Central Stara Planina Mt. – 181. Molecular data for Bulgarian animals is still insufficient, although Bulgaria ranks among the top 10 European countries in the proportion of the DNA-barcoded animal taxa; sequence coverage of animal specimens in Barcode of Life data System (BOLD) amounts to approximately 36,000 sequences from more than 7,100 Barcode index numbers (BINs). Bulgaria is part of large-scale initiatives of the European research infrastructure such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and the MOBILISE COST Action, with mass digitization of museum collections currently underway. Legislation to protect nature in Bulgaria dates back to the end of the 19th century and covers forestry (1890), the protection of certain species (1890's) and hunting (1897). Organized civil movements resulted in the establishment of the Union of Nature Protection (1928), the designation of several nature reserves (1933), and the first National Park (1934). More specific regulation followed with Ordinance for the Protection of Nature (1936). The Red Data Book of Bulgaria was published as early as 1984 (vol. 1, Plants) and 1985 (vol. 2, Animals), with a second updated edition in 2011. Bulgaria is also among the first countries to prepare a National Strategy for Biodiversity Protection (1993, adopted in 1998) following the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) process. Since then, several national plans for protection of biodiversity have been adopted including assessments of the threats, objectives, and measures for their achievement. According to recent references, such as the Red Data Book (Beshkov 2011) and the Article 17 reports of 2014 and 2020, the main threats to biodiversity in Bulgaria at the beginning of the 21st century have been human induced degradation: fragmentation and loss of habitats; industrial, agricultural and household waste pollution; direct exploitation of biological resources; genetic ingression and invasive alien species; and global climate change effects. A set of drivers for the loss of biodiversity is related to agriculture and land management, including the whole spectrum from intensification to the abandonment of traditional land, and wetland management practices.

From data pipelines to FAIR data infrastructures: A vision for the new horizons of bio- and geodiversity data for scientific research

Natural science collections are vast repositories of bio- and geodiversity specimens. These collections, originating from natural history cabinets or expeditions, are increasingly becoming unparalleled sources of data facilitating multidisciplinary research (Meineke et al. 2018, Heberling et al. 2019, Cook et al. 2020, Thompson et al. 2021). Due to various global data mobilization and digitisation efforts (Blagoderov et al. 2012,Nelson and Ellis 2018), this digitised information about specimens includes database records along with two/three-dimensional images, sonograms, sound or video recordings, computerised tomography scans, machine-readable texts from labels on the specimens as well as media items and notes related to the discovery sites and acquisition (Hedrick et al. 2020,Phillipson 2022). The scope and practice of specimen gathering are also evolving. The term extended specimen was coined to refer to the specimen and associated data extending beyond the singular physical object to other physical or digital entities such as chemical composition, genetic sequence data or species data. Thus the specimen becomes an interconnected network of data resources that have incredible potential to enhance integrative and data-driven research (Webster 2017,Lendemer et al. 2019,Hardisty et al. 2022). These practices also reflect the role of data and the curatorial data life-cycle starting from the initial material sampling process to the downstream analysis. We are also seeing growing acknowledgement that disparate and domain specific data elements prevent interdisciplinarity which is crucial for a holistic understanding of biodiversity and climate crisis (Hicks et al. 2010, Craven et al. 2019, Folk and Siniscalchi 2021). Thus the data elements are not just records or rows in a database or data pipelines going from one repository to another. They have the potential to become self-describing digital artefacts that can revolutionise how machines interpret and work with specimen data. Within this context, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), a new European Research Infrastructure for natural science collections, envisions an infrastructure based on FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) that can unify more than 170 European natural science collections under common and FAIR-compliant (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) (Wilkinson et al. 2016) access and curation policies and practices. DiSSCo’s key element in achieving FAIR is the implementation of Digital Specimen (a domain specific FDO) that closely aligns with the extended specimen practices. The idea behind Digital Specimen – an FDO that acts as a digital surrogate for a specific physical specimen in a natural science collection – was influenced by global conversations around the implementation of the Digital Object Architecture for biodiversity data (De Smedt et al. 2020, Islam et al. 2020,Hardisty et al. 2020). The main purpose of this talk is to explain the vision of how FAIR and FDO can create a data infrastructure that can not only take advantage of existing databases and repositories but at the same time provide support for innovative services such as AI and digital twinning. With scientific use cases in mind, the talk will highlight a few key FAIR and FDO components (persistent identifiers, metadata, ontologies) within the collaborative modelling activity of Digital Specimen specification. These components provide the template for specifying how a Digital Specimen should look so DiSSCo can build a FAIR service ecosystem based on FDOs (Addink et al. 2021). We will also give examples of envisioned services that can help with image feature extraction, and model training (Grieb et al. 2021,Hardisty et al. 2022) and digital twinning (Schultes et al. 2022). We believe this is an exciting new paradigm powered by FAIR and FDO that can help both humans and machines to accelerate the use of specimen data. From physical objects curated over hundred years, we have developed data pipelines, aggregators and repositories (Barberousse 2021). Now is the time to look for solutions where these data records can become FAIR Digital Objects to enable wider access and multidisciplinary research.

Honing the Visibility of TDWG: Communications expertise required

All organizations need clear and succinct mission and vision statements to communicate the purpose and overall goals of the group. These products provide the foundation for development of long(er) term strategic planning including communication plans. Logos offer us another way to highlight and brand what we do and why we do it. Periodically, for all organizations, these all need to be reviewed. The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Outreach and Communication Subcommittee took on this challenge and started a process to re-assess our current identity as presented in the existing original vision, mission, and logo. From the beginning, the subcommittee decided to follow a bottom-up method and invite all members to contribute to this process and refine its results. Community members had observed that the current logo, a simple lettering of the abbreviated old name and the organization's current name, needed to be revised to be more memorable and fit for use not only on the website, but for everything from slide decks to hex stickers for laptops. Similarly, some noted the mission and vision statements were combined and included other information like “how” TDWG works on its community-driven mission to make biodiversity data accessible. It was time to refresh TDWG’s brand with the additional challenge to keep reflecting the current values and long-standing traditions that characterize the community through a new more modern glass. Notable keys to our success in moving these goals forward started with leadership of the Outreach & Communications Committee Chair, from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and the facilitation and expertise of a Communication (Comms) and Outreach specialist from DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections). Having the skills and knowledge of the Comms person meant we benefited from a clear step-by-step process. All involved learned a lot about what to do, to expect, and whom to engage in the future for any similar reviews in other groups. In this talk, we'll take you on this journey and present the new products of the community-led process: TDWG’s Mission, Vision and the new logo. This is, however, just the starting point and there is more work to be done. The next step would be the development of a strategic plan based on this foundation as TDWG continues to work on inclusion, increased global participation, recognition of our expertise, and strategic leadership in the creation, maintenance, implementation, and adoption of our standards.

Biodiversity Informatics: A success story for the long-term financial sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

The European Open Science Cloud's (EOSC) ambition to provide European researchers, innovators, companies, and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation, and educational purposes. To enable this, EOSC promotes the use of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles. The EOSC Sustainability Working Group under the EOSC Secretariat published the FAIR Lady Report (European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2020), formulating recommendations for sustainability in the form of a Minimal Viable EOSC (MVE) including criteria for its sustainable implementation, formed by three essential components: EOSC Core, containing the minimum set of components necessary to provide researchers with the means to discover, share, access and reuse data and services; ESOC Exchange, a marketplace built on top of the EOSC Core to extend the set of public and private providers, and EOSC Data federation. EOSC Core, containing the minimum set of components necessary to provide researchers with the means to discover, share, access and reuse data and services; ESOC Exchange, a marketplace built on top of the EOSC Core to extend the set of public and private providers, and EOSC Data federation. The EOSC Association was established in July 2020 as the legal entity to govern EOSC. The Association appointed several Advisory Groups to provide recommendations towards the implementation of EOSC, including two Task Forces on Long Term Data Preservation and on the Financial Sustainability for Sustaining EOSC. This presentation will focus on the Financial Sustainability Task Force. The Task Force formed three "Working Streams" following the recommendation of the FAIR Lady Report to tackle the EOSC Core, Exchange, and Data Federation in smaller groups. Within the Data Federation Working Stream, the experts have identified many thematic data federations that have exisisted for quite some time, notably in environmental sciences, biodiversity, and social sciences. The case of Biodiversity Informatics is presented here as one of these sucess stories, retracing the history of major data federations such as GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the CoL (Catalogue of Life), BHL (Biodiversity Hertiage Library) and how they managed to move from community-driven initiatitves to structurally funded research infrastructures supported by national and international governmental authorities with a long term perspective, leading to the establishment of infrastructures like the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and LifeWatch. This presentation will also address the essential contributions of associations like TDWG (Biodiversity Information Standards) and CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) to achieving long-term sustainability and on how to successfully obtain complementary funds from EU projects in Horizon 2020 and its successor, Horizon Europe, with programs such as Synthesis of Systematic Resources (SYNTHESYS), DiSSCo Prepare, Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCiKL), and Transforming European Taxonomy through Training, Research, and Innovations (TETTRIs), to name a few.

Latimer Core: A new data standard for collection descriptions

The Latimer Core (LtC) schema, named after Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, is a standard designed to support the representation and discovery of natural science collections by structuring data about the groups of objects that those collections and their subcomponents encompass. Individual items within those groups are represented through other emerging or current standards (e.g., Darwin Core, ABCD). The LtC classes and properties aim to represent information that describes these groupings in enough detail to inform deeper discovery of the resources contained within them. The standard has been developed under the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group, and evolved from the earlier work of the Natural Collection Descriptions (NCD) group. Version 1 of the standard includes 23 classes, each with two or more properties (Fig. 1 and Suppl. material 1). The central concept of the standard is the ObjectGroup class, which represents 'an intentionally grouped set of objects with one or more common characteristics'. Arranged around the ObjectGroup are a set of classes that are commonly used to describe and classify the objects within the ObjectGroup, classes covering aspects of the custodianship, management and tracking of the collections, a generic class (MeasurementOrFact) for storing qualitative or quantitative measures within the standard, and a set of classes that are used to describe the structure and description of the dataset. Latimer Core is intended to be sufficiently flexible and scalable to apply to a wide range of collection description use cases, from describing the overall collections holdings of an institution to the contents of a single drawer of material. Various approaches are used to support this flexibility, including the use of generic classes to represent organisations, people, roles and identifiers, and enabling flexible relationships for constructing data models that meet different use cases. The collection description scheme concept is introduced to enable adopters to specify rules in the use of LtC within each specific implementation, demonstrated in Fig. 2. Guidance and reference examples for different modelling approaches to suit different use cases are provided in the LtC guidance documentation. The LtC standard has significant overlap with existing data standards (Suppl. material 2) that represent, for example, individual objects and occurrences, organisations, people and activities. Where possible, LtC has either borrowed terms directly from these standards or less formally aligned with them. Achieving a balance between offering a standard that is sufficiently comprehensive to stand alone and maintains a low technical barrier to adoption whilst minimalising duplication of effort in the context of the wider standards landscape is a notable challenge in the standard development process. The draft standard was submitted to the TDWG Executive in June 2022 to begin the process of formal review and ratification. This includes a list of standard terms and a GitHub wiki of guidance on the concepts behind and use of the standard. In the meantime, the Task Group will continue working on reference examples and serialisations, and working with infrastructures such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) on potential roadmaps towards adoption. In this presentation, we will introduce the key Latimer Core deliverables, highlight some of the challenges faced in the development process, and discuss the potential for community adoption.

Zen and the Art of Persistent Identifier Service Development for Digital Specimen

One of the most desired (and still missing) elements to enable the concept of Digital Extended (Webster et al. 2021) Specimens is a persistent identifier (PID) for the new digital specimen object. Digital Specimens are created to act as a digital surrogate of the physical objects. Digital Specimens contain all data relevant to the specimens as well as derived data like genetic sequences, trait information, and references to publications, species and environmental information. A PID for the Digital Specimen is thus essential to link it to the extended information. Furthermore, the extended information also needs PIDs to create unique and resolvable references to enable bidirectional linking. DiSSCo, Distributed System of Scientific Collections, has done extensive work to select the most appropriate PID scheme (Hardisty et al. 2021) and design a PID infrastructure for the pan-European specimen collections. The design was created in the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library project (BiCIKL) with funding from the European Commission. The draft design has been discussed with technical specialists in the joint DiSSCo and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) community, with international stakeholders like GBIF and iDigBio. The draft was also presented at the 2022 conference of SPNHC (the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections) for further feedback, after which it was finalised. This talk will provide a short overview of the key elements in the design of the Persistent Identifier system for Digital Specimens such as the metadata schema, a human friendly string format, and PID lifecycle with support for state changes of the physical object such as splitting and merging. We will illustrate this by showing the current status of development. The Digital Specimen forms the backbone of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) services (Addink et al. 2021) in development by the DiSSCo Prepare project, a project to prepare for the new research infrastructure which currently involves 170 institutions in 23 countries holding an estimated 1,5 billion specimens. The Digital Specimen is a FAIR Digital Object with a PID and machine actionable metadata to make it FAIR. The PID service ensures the identifiers’ integrity and preserves these linkages, improving the FAIR quality of all specimen data. The talk will describe the system design and current test deployment setup, as well as delve into a few technical details of the Handle Server architecture, PID Kernel records, and a roadmap for the service development. The design and test work are done under the auspices of the BiCIKL project that aims to foster collaboration between infrastructures and develop bidirectional connections between the data so that they become part of a big FAIR data pool seamlessly available to researchers (Penev et al. 2022).