Annotation of specimens in natural science collections is a fundamental knowledge-exchange mechanism for taxonomists. Today, however, this knowledge, along with the primary data associated with a given object (specimen) may be digitized and stored in databases, presented on the Web, aggregated by other resources, disseminated in paper and/or digital publications, and be stored and displayed in many diverse settings. This reality presents the biodiversity community with both an opportunity and a challenge in attempting to maintain the knowledge learned about collection objects, which traditionally has been tightly contained in collections but now may be widely distributed across independent resources. This knowledge can also be extended beyond identification-based annotation to assertions about any datum, record, or set that has a relationship to a collection object, its physical derivatives (e.g. ., botanical duplicates; mammal skins, bones, tissues, etc.; genetic samples), or associated objects (e.g., field images; audio recordings; host or pollination vectors), as well as to unvouchered observations of organisms.

The opportunity that computer-based annotation services and networks present is to both maximize knowledge gain about organisms and efficiently disseminate it to everyone who has a vested interest in it. Yet corresponding challenges exist in discovering, managing, and sharing the annotations across disparate resources with widely varying infrastructure. Several projects have incorporated annotations as a core component for communication within and between resources. A few examples include the Atlas of Living Australia, Biodiversity Heritage Library, BiSciColl, Filtered Push, Morphbank, and VertNet. Talks in this session will explore annotation systems in use in the TDWG community, and potentially relevant annotation standards such as the AO Annotation ontology being developed in the World Wide Web Consortium.