With projected lifespans of many decades, infrastructure initiatives such as Europe’s Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), USA’s Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) of China and Australia’s digitisation of national research collections (NRCA Digital, available through the Atlas of Living Australia) aim at transforming today’s slow, inefficient and limited practices of working with natural science collections. The need to borrow specimens (plants, animals, fossils or rocks) or physically visit collections, and the absence of linkages to other relevant information represent significant impediments to answering today’s important scientific and societal questions.
Continue reading “What is a Digital Specimen?”Designing and building the European Loans and Visits System for natural science collections
Along with physical access to the natural science collections, “Virtual Access” (VA) is becoming more important as it can provide much wider access to the data stored in the collections. Within SYNTHESYS+ (a DiSSCo linked project) the Virtual Access program is aiming to remove the reliance on physical access by piloting a “Digitisation on Demand” service model. One of the first steps towards this is to create a portal for the VA proposal submission and review process. We have been busy working on this for a while and the Virtual Access Applications portal has been ready for use since Feb 20, 2020.
Continue reading “Designing and building the European Loans and Visits System for natural science collections”Fundamentals of Digital Specimen Architecture
We name the architecture we’re going to use for DiSSCo as “Digital Specimen Architecture”, or “DSArch” for short. It has three fundamental components to it:
- Digital Object Architecture (DOA) as its core basis
- Built-in support for the FAIR Guiding Principles
- Evolutionary with Protected Characteristics
Here we explain why each component has been chosen and brought together in DSArch.
Continue reading “Fundamentals of Digital Specimen Architecture”Our First Blog Post
Data is most reusable where data types are simple and easy to describe, and when the community is organized and collaborative.
— Quote from “FAIR in practice”
This is the first post in the new “DiSSCo Tech” blog. We’re just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when we post new updates.
DiSSCoTech 