| Description: |
The accelerating decline of biodiversity demands urgent action to mobilise and connect the knowledge held in natural science collections. These collections represent centuries of accumulated specimen-based evidence, offering traceable and historical information essential for scientific discovery, conservation, and policy. Yet despite decades of progress in digitisation, the majority of specimen information remains inaccessible, through lack of digitisation or fragmentation across institutions and data silos. Coordinated collaboration, shared infrastructure and industrialisation of digitisation with help from machines, are needed to unlock the full potential of these resources at the scale, required to address global biodiversity challenges.The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is designed to meet this challenge. By bringing together institutions, expertise, and services across Europe, DiSSCo aims to provide a unified platform where both humans and machines can collectively work on enhancing, linking, and curating specimen data (Koureas et al. 2018). Central to this vision is the need for a common, comprehensive and extensible data model that can handle the diversity and complexity of specimen-related data and metadata, support interoperability across systems, ensure long-term accessibility of data, and compliance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Digital Object (FDO*1) principles to support machine actionability.For this, DiSSCo has developed the open Digital Specimen (openDS)*2 specification. It is an all-encompassing framework for describing, linking, and preserving digital representations of physical specimens (Hardisty et al. 2019). Unlike isolated schemas developed for specific domains, openDS functions as a shared language across the diverse service providers and communities, not only contributing to DiSSCo, but globally and across domain boundaries. It provides the flexibility needed to represent any type of specimen-related (meta-)data while embedding ... |