Digital Specimen – DiSSCoTech

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”

Debunking reliability myths of PIDs for Digital Specimens

In this post I address an erroneous assertion – a myth perhaps, that the proposed Digital Specimen Architecture relies heavily on a centralized resolver and registry for persistent identifiers that is inherently not distributed and that this makes the proposed “persistent” identifiers (PID) for Digital Specimens unreliable. By unreliable is meant link rot (‘404 notContinue reading “Debunking reliability myths of PIDs for Digital Specimens”

Natural Science Identifiers & CETAF Stable Identifiers

The DiSSCo Technical Team gets asked a lot about Natural Science Identifiers (NSId). What are they? Why do we need them in addition to CETAF Stable Identifiers? Are they just for DiSSCo/Europe or are they global? In this post we answer those questions. Q1. What is a Natural Science Identifier (NSId)? A Natural Science IdentifierContinue reading “Natural Science Identifiers & CETAF Stable Identifiers”

What is a Digital Specimen?

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 ofContinue reading “What is a Digital Specimen?”