Research Infrastructure Contact Zones: a framework and dataset to characterise the activities of major biodiversity informatics initiatives
Creators
- 1. Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom
- 2. Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands|Distributed System of Scientific Collections - DiSSCo, Leiden, Netherlands
- 3. LifeWatch ERIC, Seville, Spain|Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture, Heraklion, Crete, Greece
- 4. Catalogue of Life, Amsterdam, Netherlands|Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands
- 5. Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities, Brussels, Belgium
- 6. Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris, France
- 7. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin, Germany
- 8. International Barcode of Life, Guelph, Canada
- 9. Smithsonian Institution Libraries and Archives / Biodiversity Heritage Library, Washington, United States of America
- 10. Meise Botanic Garden, Meise, Belgium|Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium
- 11. GBIF, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 12. Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland|University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 13. Finnish Museum of Natural History, Helsinki, Finland
Description
The landscape of biodiversity data infrastructures and organisations is complex and fragmented. Many occupy specialised niches representing narrow segments of the multidimensional biodiversity informatics space, while others operate across a broad front, but differ from others by data type(s) handled, their geographic scope and the life cycle phase(s) of the data they support. In an effort to characterise the various dimensions of the biodiversity informatics landscape, we developed a framework and dataset to survey these dimensions for ten organisations (DiSSCo, GBIF, iBOL, Catalogue of Life, iNaturalist, Biodiversity Heritage Library, GeoCASe, LifeWatch, eLTER ELIXIR), relative to both their current activities and long-term strategic ambitions.
The survey assessed the contact between the infrastructure organisations by capturing the breadth of activities for each infrastructure across five categories (data, standards, software, hardware and policy), for nine types of data (specimens, collection descriptions, opportunistic observations, systematic observations, taxonomies, traits, geological data, molecular data and literature) and for seven phases of activity (creation, aggregation, access, annotation, interlinkage, analysis and synthesis). This generated a dataset of 6,300 verified observations, which have been scored and validated by leading members of each infrastructure organisation. The resulting data allow high-level questions about the overall biodiversity informatics landscape to be addressed, including the greatest gaps and contact between organisations.
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BDJ_article_82953.pdf
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