The focus of my work is on the development of globally integrated and extensible data infrastructures and open knowledge management systems for biodiversity data.
As member of the Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge I contributed to and was moderator in the global consultations hosted by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2021. The public consultations brought together the communities of GBIF, the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in North America, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the European Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) with their respective regionally developed approaches and concepts. The exchanges and discussions resulted in the development of a shared concept, the Digital Extended Specimen (DES), for more information see the article by Hardisty et al. (2022) in Bioscience.
Development of the DES has the goal to realize the digital representation of physical specimens and information artifacts (e.g. images, audio recordings, etc.) that are providing empirical records of biodiversity as FAIR and CARE digital objects (DO). Implemented as a Digital Objects Architecture (DOA) following the long-term TRUST principles, the DOs will allow data to be openly accessible, the dense linking of data independent of data type, and enable humans and machines to perform transactions on them, all governed by the policies and rules recorded within the DO for access, use and benefit sharing.
Since 2022, the cross-continental exchange is continued within the International Partners for the Digital Extended Specimen group, an informal global network of biodiversity data and infrastructure developers and maintainers, community coordinators and scientists. As organizing team we are facilitating the group to achieve its goals, including the promotion of the development and implementation of the DES, the alignment of regional activities and the building of social, technical and data capacities that enable the reuse of existing data and research, and empower transdisciplinary collaboration on research and applications that contribute to addressing the biodiversity crisis and associated challenges of societies today.
