On Dec 19, after hours of negotiations and discussions, nations (except the U.S. and the Vatican) agreed to protect 30% of the planet for nature by 2030 (also known as the 30 x 30 agreement). The post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework has been proclaimed both as a historic decision and also as a missed opportunity toContinue reading “Kunming – Montreal post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework: What does it mean for biodiversity research infrastructures?”
Author Archives: Sharif Islam
Roundup of technical updates
Dear Readers, In this post, we share some of our recent updates. We have been super busy with various technical developments. Here are a few highlights: Upcoming conference presentations 📺 We will be at The Biodiversity Information Standard (TDWG) 2022! This year the annual conference will be a hybrid meeting, hosted in Sofia, Bulgaria. AfterContinue reading “Roundup of technical updates”
Why Spreadsheets Matter?
A news story published on Aug 6, 2020, in The Verge had the following to say: “Sometimes it’s easier to rewrite genetics than update Excel“. The story was about a known problem where Excel by default converts gene names to dates . You can try this out at home with the gene symbol “MARCHF1” —Continue reading “Why Spreadsheets Matter?”
Identifiers and contextual data
Persistent identifiers, their links to other identifiers and various contextual data are essential components of the DiSSCo architectural design. Here is a brief example to demonstrate the importance of these identifiers, linking them and providing enough contextual information to perform operations on the digital specimen objects. The example here also highlights some of the challengesContinue reading “Identifiers and contextual data”
Roundup of recent news
A lot has happened since our last post here. So a roundup of recent news. Our very own Wouter Addink presented DiSSCo at the Chinese national biodiversity informatics congress. This is a great initiative to facilitate global conversations around data and infrastructures. Several members of the DiSSCo Technical Team and members of DiSSCo Prepare WP5Continue reading “Roundup of recent news”
ELViS 1.0.0 is here: An important milestone for DiSSCo
On March 18, 2021 a new deployment of ELViS (European Loans and Visits System) became available. ELViS 1.0.0 is currently being used to facilitate the 3rd Transnational Access call for SYNTHESYS+ (to fund short-term research visits to consortium institutions) and the 2nd Virtual Access call (to fund digitisation-on-demand requests). The current version of ELViS isContinue reading “ELViS 1.0.0 is here: An important milestone for DiSSCo”
Reflections on TDWG 2020 Virtual sessions and other thoughts on long term data infrastructures
This year the annual conference of the Biodiversity Information Standards (historically known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group — TDWG) is virtual and happening in two parts. The working sessions were concluded a few weeks ago and are separated from the virtual conference, which will be held on October 19-23. All the recordings of theContinue reading “Reflections on TDWG 2020 Virtual sessions and other thoughts on long term data infrastructures”
Importance of FAIR data mobilization for taxonomic research
As the world is dealing with the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 a great deal of effort has been focusing on data sharing, linking and open science in general. For instance the community around taxonomic research (see Joint CETAF-DiSSCo COVID-19 Task Force) is focusing on international collaborations to make use of data that can help us understand theContinue reading “Importance of FAIR data mobilization for taxonomic research”
Designing and building the European Loans and Visits System for natural science collections
Bringing in disparate and heterogeneous datasets on institutions, people, collections and specimens, ELViS will provide a service that handles various stages of the research data life cycle.
DiSSCoTech 