Digitisation infrastructure design for national open science clouds

This report describes the feasibility and potential role of national data infrastructures in large-scale digitisation of natural history collections, especially in the case of Finland. The descriptions of services, capacities, costs, and data flows from digitisation facilities to these national level systems and further to European systems are studied in the context of Finland. Discussion of use and possible designs are also included. The report is structured in five parts:

1. The Introduction part describes the background of this study and the general status of national data infrastructures in Europe. The case of Finland is emphasized and the available computing and data services are introduced.
2. The Infrastructure chapter describes FinBIF (Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility), CSC (the Finnish national IT centre for science) Pouta cloud computing services, and the Finnish Fairdata services.
3. In chapter 3, the data module used in FinBIF is presented, including the identifier, metadata, and API (Application Programming Interface).
4. The design chapter describes the overall architectural view and data flows of the digitisation process with the use of Finnish national data infrastructures.
5. In the last chapter, the feasibility and potential role of national data infrastructures for digitisation facilities are discussed. We concluded that national data infrastructures tailored for biodiversity data, such as FinBIF, are highly necessary for the digitisation facility of natural history collections.