Following the BOF01: Converging Digital Specimens and Extended Specimens – Towards a global specification birds-of-a-feather session presented at TDWG 2020 Virtual Conference on 22 Sept: the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) together with the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) initiated a collaboration call to converge towards a global specification on Digital and Extended Specimens.
CONVERGING DIGITAL SPECIMENS AND EXTENDED SPECIMENS TOWARDS A GLOBAL SPECIFICATION
During the BOF01: Converging Digital Specimens and Extended Specimens – Towards a global specification birds-of-a-feather session presented at the TDWG 2020 Virtual Conference on 22 Sept, Alex Hardisty (Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK) and Andrew Bentley (University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA) addressed the convergence of the digital and extended specimen (DS and ES) concepts. Hardisty described DS as the transformative mechanism necessary to link natural science specimens with other artifacts and data about them.
Together, DS and ES embody the idea of a curated and authoritative package (or container) of links to data about the physical specimen that is a more efficient and reliable/trusted source of data for scientific work, with potential to save time spent by a scientist finding and collating data about specimens they are interested in. They also ensure the vision of visiting a virtual specimen records and finding all of the ecological, climate, literature, field note, and genomic, and myriad other data that increase its value and enhances its use for science. Hardisty and Bentley’s presentations generated robust discussion and potential of this concept.
Following the discussion, Wouter Addink, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, NL, distributed a letter of intent for global collaboration to achieve the DS/ES vision.
iDig Bio also signed the letter of intent and joined the call and collaborates actively to this global discussion.
Both organizations and individuals are eligible to sign the letter. iDigBio has signed and is committed to global collaboration.
