13 April 2021
We are hiring! Naturalis is looking for a Lead Programmer for the development of DiSSCo Digital Specimen Architecture pilots (2 years, 32- 36 hours a week). The objective of this position is to further develop and transition the nsidr.org demonstrator into a Digital Specimen (DS) pilot to link information about natural history specimens together and enable community curation and annotation.
A bit of context
Naturalis leads the development of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for natural science collections. DiSSCo will bring together 130+ museums across 22 European countries to unify and serve genomic, geographical, morphological and taxonomic knowledge for the 1.5 billion physical objects held in European collections.
Although DiSSCo RI will only be fully operative in 2026, it is already starting to work on early e-Services and pilots to demonstrate the added value and feasibility of its plans for a Digital Specimen Architecture (DSArch). In order to develop and demonstrate the concept, as well as to conduct pilots, Naturalis is looking for a lead programmer.
Data derived from collection specimens is fundamental to scientific biodiversity and geodiversity research. DiSSCo RI will introduce a step change by massively improving the way scientists discover, access and analyse complex and previously disjoined information deriving from the study of the vast European natural science collections.
The ICEDIG project -predecessor of DiSSCo- developed a demonstrator NSIDR registry (nsidr.org) that shows how a DS objects registry can be built using Cordra, Handles and the DOIP protocol. It also demonstrates how this can supply enriched specimen data implementing links to GBIF data, Catalogue of Life (for taxon names), EBI (for sequence data) and WikiData. Furthermore, the implementation was used to demonstrate a direct connection through DOIP with a collection management system (Memorix) and to showcase the handling of provenance/attribution events.
About the position
Objective of this position is to further develop and transition the nsidr.org demonstrator into a Digital Specimen pilot to showcase and test the novel principles of a FAIR Digital Object infrastructure (FAIR DO) to link information about natural history specimens together and enable community curation and annotation.
DiSSCo’s technical team has created a wish list for further development of this demonstrator which involves several inter-related developments – in the schema/mechanisms of the repository, in the simpleUI, and in service/app software. These developments will likely need Elasticsearch, SPARQL and NEO4J graph database implementations as well as implementation of APIs and may benefit from machine learning too.
Full information about specific development tasks here.
Naturalis Biodiversity Center is the leading Biodiversity institution in The Netherlands and host to DiSSCo’s Coordination and Support Office (CSO).
Job offer package
Naturalis offers a contract (36 hours per week, 32 is possible) for a period of one year, to be extended with one year after a successful first year evaluation. For more information about salary and application procedure, please visit the Naturalis’s website.