Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Semantic approach for collection data via open data webs instead of closed systems
Falko Glöckler, Alexander Kroupa, Anton Güntsch, Gregor Hagedorn

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-30 02:50 PM – 02:59 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-07

Abstract


Natural history collections are one of the foundations of biodiversity and taxonomic research. They have a long tradition and are as important today as they were 200 years ago. With the arrival of major digitization efforts in the near future these catalogues might be completely replaced by digital collection management systems. Natural history collection data is becoming more and more available and searchable in the internet via international biodiversity initiatives like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) which provide these primary biodiversity data to the broad community. Nevertheless, taxonomists and curators benefit less from the digitization in their daily work than they could. Certainly, it is faster to search for collection objects in a well-structured digital catalogue than in a non-digital one. But which further advantages can be gained? We assume that there are more benefits for the work with the physical collections and consider that within the digital world the curation can be improved through interactions across institutional borders. We will present an interactive collection approach which potentially links collection data and curation workflows. Supported aspects are different identifiers for objects and web representation, dereferencable identifiers, levels of stability management of media, Linked Open Data compatible identifiers, citability of versioned states of the collection. It includes an idea for a social component that enables the collection staff to recognize `who worked when on what?`. Thus, linking the data as well as the progress of workflows in distributed collections will provide a new opportunity for direct collaborations and for prioritizing the curation work and digitization efforts based on a common focus across departments or institutions. Access to data can become demand-driven rather than centrally determined through a data portal. However, the role of aggregators like GBIF will remain important as discovery mechanisms. Within the project EoS at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany, which targets the optimization of digitization workflows of object-rich collections (using the example of entomological collections), we are presently testing such a collaborative approach in a proof of concept. Our aims are (1) providing dereferencable and citable stable URIs for physical objects, (2) linking related objects, taxa, locations, persons and topics derived from the available data, (3) a basic social service for curators and scientists based on the linked data.