Biodiversity Information Science and Standards最新文献

{"title":"The Global Biodata Coalition: Towards a sustainable biodata infrastructure","authors":"Chuck Cook, Guy Cochrane","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112303","url":null,"abstract":"Progress in life and biomedical sciences depends absolutely on biodata resources—databases comprising biological data and services around those databases. Supporting scientists in data operations and spanning management, analysis and publication of newly generated data and access to pre-existing reference data, these biodata resources together comprise a critical infrastructure for life science and biomedical research. Familiar scientific infrastructures—for example the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) or the Square Kilometer Array, are distinct, constructed, physical entities that are centrally funded and managed at one or more identifiable locations. By contrast, the primary infrastructure of the life sciences—comprised of databases and other biological data resources—is globally distributed, virtually connected, funded from multiple sources, and is not managed as a coordinated entity. While this configuration supports innovation, it lends itself poorly to the long-term sustainability of individual biodata resources and of the infrastructure as a whole. The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) brings together life science research funding organisations that recognise these challenges and acknowledge the threat that the lack of sustainability poses. They agree to work together to find ways to improve sustainability.\u0000 In the presentation, we will provide an overview of the global biodata resource infrastructure, focusing in particular on challenges to providing sustained long-term funding to the resources that comprise the infrastructure. This will provide a global context to other presentations in the session, which focus on biodata resources in Australia.\u0000 Covering some of the work that GBC has carried out to understand and classify biodata resources and the entire biodata resource infrastructure, we will outline the Global Core Biodata Resource programme and Inventory project and also introduce the stakeholder consultation processes around approaches to sustainability and open data. Finally, we will lay out the path GBC is taking to engage researchers, informaticians, funding organisations and other stakeholders in moving towards greater sustainability for these critical resources","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"197 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76232603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Celebrating BHL Australia through the Eye of the (Tasmanian) Tiger","authors":"Nicole Kearney","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112352","url":null,"abstract":"BHL Australia, the Australian branch of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), was launched in 2010 and began operation with a single organisation, Museums Victoria in Melbourne. Since then, it has grown considerably. Funded by the Atlas of Living Australia, BHL Australia now digitises biodiversity literature on behalf of 42 organisations across the country. These organisations include museums, herbaria, state libraries, royal societies, government agencies, field naturalist clubs and natural history publishers, many of whom lack the resources to do this work themselves. BHL Australia’s national consortium model, which makes biodiversity literature accessible on behalf of so many organisations, is unique amongst the BHL global community. Most BHL operations digitise material on behalf of a single organisation.\u0000 BHL Australia has now made over 530,000 pages of Australia’s biodiversity knowledge freely accessible online. The BHL Australia Collection includes both published works (books and journals) and unpublished material (collection registers, field diaries and correspondence). The pages of these works are filled with species descriptions, references to historically significant people and, most importantly, scientific data that is critical to ongoing research and conservation efforts. Providing access to materials published as far back as the 1600s and as recently as the current year, the collection chronicles the scientific discovery and understanding of Australia’s biodiversity.\u0000 BHL Australia also leads the global initiative to bring the world's historic biodiversity and taxonomic literature into the modern linked network of scholarly research by incorporating article data into BHL and retrospectively assigning DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) (Kearney et al. 2021). BHL has now assigned more than 162,000 DOIs to historic publications, making them persistently citable and trackable, both within BHL and beyond. \u0000 This paper will celebrate the achievements of BHL Australia by journeying through the (now accessible, discoverable and DOI'd) Tasmanian Tiger literature. It will showcase:\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 \u0000 previously elusive descriptions (and beautiful illustrations) of Thylacines, including those by Gerhard Krefft (1871) https://doi.org/10.5962/p.314741, and John Gould (1863) https://doi.org/10.5962/p.312790;\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 the invaluable creation of links to open access versions from paywalled publications that should be in the public domain, such as the first description of the Thylacine (Harris 1808): open access on BHL; paywalled by Oxford Academic;\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 the many citations of historic taxonomic descriptions that are now appearing as clickable DOI links in modern scholarly articles, taxonomic databases, social media, and Wikipedia (Kearney and Page 2022); and\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 the efforts being made to encourage more authors to cite the authoritative source of taxonomic names (Benichou 2022).\u0000 \u0000 \u0000 \u0000 previously elusive descriptions (and beautiful illustrations) of Thylacines, i","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84286904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Novel Part in the Swiss Army Knife for Linking Biodiversity Data: The digital specimen identifier service","authors":"W. Addink, Soulaine Theocharides, Sharif Islam","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112283","url":null,"abstract":"Digital specimens are new information objects on the internet, which act as digital surrogates of the physical objects they represent. They are designed to be extended with data derived from the specimen like genetic, morphological and chemical data, and with data that puts the specimen in context of its gathering event and the environment it was derived from. This requires linking the digital specimens and their related entities to information about agents, locations, publications, taxa and environmental information. To establish reliable links and (re-)connect data to specimens, a new framework is needed, which creates persistent identifiers (PIDs) for the digital specimen and its related entities. These PIDs should be actionable by machines but also can be used by humans for data citation and communication purposes.\u0000 The framework that enables this is a new PID infrastructure, produced by the European Commission-funded BiCIKL project (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library), creates persistent and actionable identifiers. It is a generic PID infrastructure that will be used by the Distributed System for Scientific Collections research infrastructure (DiSSCo), but it can also be used by other infrastructures and institutions. PIDs minted by DiSSCo will be linked to the digital specimens and samples provided through DiSSCo. The new PIDs are a key element in enabling the concept of Digital Extended Specimens (Webster et al. 2021) and provide unique and resolvable references to enable bidirectional linking. \u0000 DiSSCo has done extensive work to select the most appropriate PID scheme (Hardisty et al. 2021) and to design a PID infrastructure for the pan-European specimens. The draft design has been discussed with technical specialists in the joint DiSSCo and Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) community, with international stakeholders like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) and was discussed at the 2022 conference of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC). A first implementation was demonstrated in the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) annual conference in 2022 and illustrated key elements in the design. To be able to provide digital specimen identifiers as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), a pilot project was started in 2023 with DataCite to investigate if Digital Specimen DOIs in the new PID infrastructure can be created using the DataCite service. The pilot aim was to create metadata crosswalks to the DataCite schema in consultation with the DataCite Metadata Working Group, to evaluate synergies with the IGSN (International Generic Sample Number) metadata schema, to develop and test PID kernel metadata registration, and to evaluate performance and the impact of using DataCite services. There are around two billion specimens and creating PIDs for them as DOIs requires creating DOIs at an unprecedented scale. Also,","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89183646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Want to Describe and Share Biodiversity Inventory and Monitoring Data? The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Can Help!","authors":"Y. Sica, Wesley Hochachka, Yi-Ming Gan, Kate Ingenloff, Dmitry Schigel, Robert Stevenson, Steven Baskauf, Peter Brenton, Anahita J. N. Kazem, John Wieczorek","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112229","url":null,"abstract":"Access to high-quality ecological data is critical to assessing and modeling biodiversity and its changes through space and time. The Darwin Core standard has proven to be immensely helpful in sharing species occurrence data (see Wieczorek et al. 2012, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF) and promoting biodiversity research following the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (Wilkinson et al. 2016). However, it is limited in its ability to fully accommodate inventory data (i.e., linked records of multiple taxa at a specific place and time). Information about the inventory processes is often either unreported or described in an unstructured manner, limiting its potential re-use for larger-scale analyses. Two key aspects that are not captured in a structured manner yet are: i) information about the species that were not detected during an inventory, and ii) ancillary information about sampling effort and completeness.\u0000 Non-detections (i.e., reported counts of zero) potentially enable more accurate and precise estimates of distribution, abundance, and changes in abundance. This becomes possible when variation in effort is used to estimate the likelihood that a non-detection represents a true absence of that taxon during the inventory. Currently, ecological inventory data, when shared at all, are typically discoverable through dataset catalogs (e.g., governmental data repositories) and supplementary materials to publications. With few exceptions, indexing of such data with the detail and structure needed has not been attempted at broad temporal and spatial scales, despite the potentially high value resulting from making inventory data more readily accessible.\u0000 To address these limitations in documenting inventory data using the Darwin Core, Guralnick et al. (2018) proposed the Humboldt Core. Subsequent discussions within the biodiversity standards community made it clear that greater integration could be achieved by creating an extension of the Darwin Core, rather than developing a new standard in isolation. Extension design work began in 2021 and progress has been reported by Brenton (2021) and Sica et al. (2022). \u0000 Over the last year the Humboldt Extension Task Group has sought advice from data providers and aggregators and updated its vocabulary terms. A challenging aspect has been creating terminology for the parent-child relationships (see Properties of Hierarchical Events) needed to describe surveys that may be as simple as a collection of checklists (one level of hierarchy) or as complex as species records from traps within plots along transects across habitats over multiple years (at least four levels of hierarchy). The Task Group has committed to completing a User Guide for the Humboldt Extension. Group members who contributed to the Darwin Core (Darwin Core Task Group 2009) and the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification (Vocabulary Maintenance Specification Task Group 2017) have provided va","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"1939 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91122617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Biodata Infrastructure within Australia and Beyond: Landscapes and horizons","authors":"Jeff Christiansen, Kathryn Hall","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112274","url":null,"abstract":"In current life science practice, digital data are associated with all parts of the research lifecycle. Generation and management of data are planned for during project conception; collected from numerous instruments or existing sources; prepared for analysis and analysed to generate new knowledge and information; and then (hopefully) preserved so that the data may be found, shared and re-used by others when appropriate. \u0000 This session will begin with a scan of the biodata and biodata infrastructure landscape within Australia. We will explore which organisations fund biodata generation, where data are processed and stored, and how data are made available for reuse by others. Important global and complementary data resources that are hosted offshore will also be discussed. To guarantee reproducibility and integrity for life sciences research, it is critical that each of these infrastructures (whether they are hosted on- or off-shore) are maintained for the long term.\u0000 As an example of a resource that utilises a mixture of existing on- and off-shore data infrastructures to underpin a critical research need, the Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) will be discussed. ARGA is solving the problem of genomics data obscurity for Australian-relevant species by creating an online platform where life sciences researchers can comprehensively and confidently search for genomic data for taxa relevant to Australian research. Publicly available genomics (and genetics) data are aggregated and indexed from multiple sources (both on- and off-shore), and then integrated with occurrence records and the taxonomic frameworks of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) to enrich the genomic data and make them searchable using taxonomy, location, ecological characteristics and selected phenotypic data. The presentation sets the scene for a subsequent talk by members of the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC), who will outline the challenges in sustaining the types of disseminated infrastructure discussed and the GBC’s work with the funders who support many of these resources to ensure long-term funding for existing infrastructure, while also channelling support to underpin future growth in data volumes and new technologies.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87150039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Semantic Mapping of the Geologic Time Scale: A temporal reference","authors":"Susan Edelstein, Ben Norton","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112232","url":null,"abstract":"The Geologic Time Scale is an ordered hierarchical set of terms representing specific time intervals in Earth's history. The hierarchical structure is correlated to the geologic record and major geologic events in Earth’s history (Gradstein et al. 2020). In the absence of quantitative numeric age values from absolute dating methods, the relative time intervals in the geologic time scale provide us with the vocabulary needed for deciphering Earth’s history and chronological reconstruction. This temporal frame of reference is critical to establishing correlations between specimens and how they fit within the Earth’s 4.567 Ga (giga annum) history.\u0000 Due to spatial and temporal variations in the stratigraphic record, the terminology used in conjunction with geologic time scales is largely inconsistent. For a detailed discussion regarding term use in geologic timescales, see Cohen et al. (2013). As a result, published values for geologic timescale terms are often ambiguous and highly variable, limiting interoperability and hindering temporal correlations among specimens. A solution is to map verbatim geologic timescale values to a controlled vocabulary, constructing a single temporal frame of reference. The harmonization process is governed by an established set of business rules that can ultimately become fully or partially automated.\u0000 In this study, we examined the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF) published distinct verbatim values for Darwin Core terms in the GeologicalContext Class of Darwin Core to assess the the use of chronostratiphic terms, a process highlighted in Sahdev et al. (2017). Preservation of these verbatim values, the initial unmapped set of published values, is important. Many are derived directly from primary source material and possess special historical and regional significance. These include land mammal ages (e.g., Lindsay (2003)), biostratigraphic zones, regional terms, and terms with higher granularity than the International Commission of Stratigraphy’s (ICS) timescale allows (e.g., subages/substages). For the purposes of this study, we selected the 2023/6 version of the ICS chronostratigraphic timescale as the controlled vocabulary (Cohen et al. 2023). The ICS is the most widely adopted timescale, comprising the most generalized and universally applicable intervals of geologic time.\u0000 After semantic analysis of the verbatim values (see Table 1 for comparative statistics), we established a comprehensive set of business rules to map to the ICS timescale controlled vocabulary. This process yielded a collection of documented procedures to transform the heterogeneous collection of published terms into a semantically consistent dataset. The end result is a single temporal frame of reference for published geologic and paleontological specimens through semantic mapping to improve the temporal correlations between geologic specimens globally through data interoperability. This talk will highlight the process of harmon","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84260869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Regional Data Platform of West and Central African Herbaria","authors":"Alice Ainsa, Sophie Pamerlon, Anne-Sophie Archambeau, Rémi Beauvieux, R. Radji, Hervé Chevillotte","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112180","url":null,"abstract":"In April 2021, a Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) project was launched to deliver a regional data platform of West and Central African herbaria, which just concluded in April 2023. A dataset containing 168,545 herbarium specimens from 6 different countries: Togo, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Benin, Guinea Conakry and Cameroon, is now visible on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website and will be regularly updated. A checklist datatset (Radji 2023a) and an occurrence dataset (Radji 2023b) obtained from herbarium parts are also available on GBIF.\u0000 In addition, a Living Atlases portal for herbaria in West and Central Africa has been created to allow users to search, display, filter, and download these data. This application reuses open source modules developed by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) community (Morin et al. 2021).\u0000 In addition to that, the RIHA platform (Réseau Informatique des Herbiers d'Afrique / Digital Network of African Herbaria) enables herbarium administrators to manage their own data. Thanks to all these tools, the workflow (Fig. 1) for data publication on GBIF is carried out regularly and easily and the addition of new member herbaria from West and Central Africa can be easily incorporated.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80691004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Retiring TDWG Standards and How Mapping Standards Could Support Agility","authors":"Kristen \"Kit\" Lewers","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112258","url":null,"abstract":"Since its genesis in September 1985, TDWG (formerly Taxonomic Databases Working Group now Biodiversity Information Standards) has become the steward of standards for the biodiversity informatics community; however, there is not yet a process for retiring standards. This talk will educate the community members on TDWG Standard categories of \"Current Standard\", \"Prior Standard\", \"2005 Standard\", and the history and context of how these categories came to be. It will also report on the progress the TAG (Technical Architecture Group) has made on moving towards creating a process for retiring standards through auditing, community participation, and other methods. \u0000 Mapping TDWG standards can provide an agility to address overlaps, gaps, contradictions, and/or inconsistencies between standards in a proactive manner. Mapping standards' relationships provides infrastructure to support decision-making, combat information overload, and give context to the community as it continues to progress at a rapid pace. More specifically for TDWG, it gives a clear picture how updating, ratifying, and/or retiring a singular standard impacts the greater TDWG information ecosystem and how to update adjacent standards to preserve clarity and consistency for the community as a whole.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"91 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83207348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Elevating the Fitness of Use of GBIF Occurrence Datasets: A proposal for peer review","authors":"Vijay Barve","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112237","url":null,"abstract":"Biodiversity data plays a pivotal role in understanding and conserving our natural world. As the largest occurrence data aggregator, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) serves as a valuable platform for researchers and practitioners to access and analyze biodiversity information from across the globe (Ball-Damerow et al. 2019). However, ensuring the quality of GBIF datasets remains a critical challenge (Chapman 2005).\u0000 The community emphasizes the importance of data quality and its direct impact on the fitness of use for biodiversity research and conservation efforts (Chapman et al. 2020). While GBIF continues to grow in terms of the quantity of data it provides, the quality of these datasets varies significantly (Zizka et al. 2020). The biodiversity informatics community has been working diligently to ensure data quality at every step of data creation, curation, publication (Waller et al. 2021), and end-use (Gueta et al. 2019) by employing automated tools and flagging systems to identify and address issues. However, there is still more work to be done to effectively address data quality problems and enhance the fitness of use for GBIF-mediated data.\u0000 I highlight a missing component in GBIF's data publication process: the absence of formal peer reviews. Despite GBIF encompassing the essential elements of a data paper, including detailed metadata, data accessibility, and robust data citation mechanisms, the lack of peer review hinders the credibility and reliability of the datasets mobilized through GBIF.\u0000 To bridge this gap, I propose the implementation of a comprehensive peer review system within GBIF. Peer reviews would involve subjecting GBIF datasets to rigorous evaluation by domain experts and data scientists, ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of the data. This process would enhance the trustworthiness and usability of datasets, enabling researchers and policymakers to make informed decisions based on reliable biodiversity information.\u0000 Furthermore, the establishment of a peer review system within GBIF would foster collaboration and knowledge exchange among the biodiversity community, as experts provide constructive feedback to dataset authors. This iterative process would not only improve data quality but also encourage data contributors to adhere to best practices, thereby elevating the overall standards of biodiversity data mobilization through GBIF.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74002214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Long Tails of Specimen Data","authors":"Arturo H. Ariño","doi":"10.3897/biss.7.112151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112151","url":null,"abstract":"A recent article by K.R. Johnson and I.F.P. Owens in Science (Johnson and Owens 2023) suggested that the 73 main natural history museums around the world collectively hold over 1 billion records of accessioned \"specimens\" (taken as collection units), a result remarkably close to, but obtained through a completely different method from, research published a decade earlier by A.H. Ariño in Biodiversity Informatics (Ariño 2010). Both sets of approaches have benefitted from information available at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which in the intervening years has grown by an order of magnitude, although mostly through observation-based occurrences rather than through accretion of specimen records in collections. When comparing the estimated size of collections and the amount of digital data from those collections, there is still a huge gap, as there was then. Digitization efforts have been progressing, but they are still far from reaching the goal of bringing information about all specimens into the digital domain.\u0000 While the larger institutions may doubtlessly have greater overall resources to try and make their data available than smaller institutions, how do they compare in terms of data mobilization and sharing? Not surprisingly, the distribution of the collection sizes shows a long tail of small institutions that, nonetheless, are also embarking on digitization efforts. Will this long tail of science actually manage to have all their biodiversity data available sooner than the larger institutions? It is becoming more widely recognized that data usability is predicated on data becoming findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR, Wilkinson et al. 2016). What could be the consequences of having a data availability bias towards having many tiny collections available for ready use, rather than a much smaller (although surely very significant) fraction of larger collections of a comparable type?\u0000 This presentation explores and compares the distribution of potential versus readily available data in 2010 and in 2023, examines what trends might exist in the race to universal specimen data availability, and whether the digitization efforts might be better targeted to achieve greater overall scientific benefit.","PeriodicalId":9011,"journal":{"name":"Biodiversity Information Science and Standards","volume":"241 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78356990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}