Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet

Alex R. Hardisty, Elizabeth R. Ellwood, Gil Nelson, Breda Zimkus, Jutta Buschbom, Wouter Addink, Richard K. Rabeler, John Bates, Andrew Bentley, Jose A.B. Fortes, Sara Hansen, James A. MacKlin, Austin R. Mast, Joseph T. Miller, Anna K. Monfils, Deborah L. Paul, Elycia Wallis, Michael Webster

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

Abstract

The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information. In the present article, we propose a new interconnected network of digital objects on the Internet - the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) network - that transcends existing aggregator technology, augments the DES with third-party data through machine algorithms, and provides a platform for more efficient research and robust interdisciplinary discovery.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)978-987
Number of pages10
JournalBioScience
Volume72
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2022

Keywords

  • Digital Extended Specimen
  • biodiversity collections
  • digital specimen
  • extended specimen
  • natural history

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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