18 July 2023
The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH) is now online!
BKH is a one-stop portal that allows users to access FAIR and interlinked biodiversity data and services in a few clicks. BKH has been designed to support a newly emerging community of users over time and across the entire biodiversity research cycle providing its services to anybody, anywhere and anytime.
By BiCIKL’s communications team
“The Knowledge Hub is the main product from our BiCIKL consortium, and we are delighted with the result! BKH can easily be seen as the beginning of the major shift in the way we search interlinked biodiversity information,” says Prof. Lyubomir Penev, BiCIKL’s Project coordinator and Founder of Pensoft Publishers.
“Biodiversity researchers, Research Infrastructures and publishers interested in fields ranging from taxonomy to ecology and bioinformatics can now freely use BKH as a compass to navigate the oceans of biodiversity data. BKH will do the linkages,” he adds.
Photo: The BKH offers access to data, tools and services provided by Research Infrastructures while opening the door to new contributors.
The core: FAIR data place
“We have invested our best energies and resources in the development of BKH and the Fair Data Place (FDP), which is the beating heart of the portal” – says Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of LifeWatch ERIC – “BKH has been designed to support a new emerging community of users across the entire biodiversity research cycle. Its purpose goes beyond the BiCIKL project itself: we are thrilled to say that BKH is meant to stay, aiming to reshape how biodiversity knowledge is accessed and used.”
“The BKH outlines how users can navigate and access the linked data, tools and services of the infrastructures cooperating in BiCIKL,” said Joe Miller, Executive Secretary of GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. “By revealing how they harvest, liberate and reuse data, these increasingly integrated sources enable researchers in the natural sciences to move more seamlessly between specimens and material samples, genomic and metagenomic data, scientific literature, and taxonomic names and units.”
Photo: Screenshot of the FAIR Data Place at BiCIKL’s Biodiversity Knowledge Hub
A training programme on how to best utilise the platform is currently being developed by CETAF, PENSOFT, Plazi, MeiseBG, EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR Hub, GBIF, and LifeWatch ERIC and will be finalised in the coming months.
A detailed description of the BKH tools and services provided by its contributing organisations is available at:
Do you want to know more about the technical side of DiSSCo? DiSSCo puts different technical knowledge platforms at the scientific community’s disposal:
DiSSCoTech: Get the latest technical posts about the design of DiSSCo’s Infrastructure
DiSSCo Labs: A preview of experimental services and demonstrators by the DiSSCo community
DiSSCo GitHub: Code hosting for DiSSCo software, version control and collaboration