Starting in mid-June, the alliance for biodiversity knowledge will convene a follow up to the consultation that was held in February and March to converge the ideas behind two related but distinct concepts: the Digital Specimen, proposed by the Europe-based Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), and the Extended Specimen, which emerged from the Biological Collections Network (BCoN). Phase 2 will focus on capturing the infrastructure capabilities needed to support Digital Extended Specimens.
Similar to the first phase, a landing page for the consultation has been created and is now live on the GBIF community forum.
Consultation Format:
Phase 2 of the virtual global consultation will involve two components:
- Two opening webinar sessions on June 15, scheduled nine time zones apart at UTC 05:00 and UTC 15:00 to support wider global participation, to introduce the topics to be discussed. Pre-register for the introductory sessions here.
- An open, facilitated online consultation running between June 15 and July 27, 2021, consisting of multiple online discussion threads hosted on the GBIF community forum.
Who should participate?
Anyone with an interest in natural history collections can join the consultation as a contributor at any time and ensure that they receive regular updates on the process. We want to hear from you, especially if you:
- Are a collections professional
- Work with living, preserved, or geological specimens
- Work for a data provider or aggregator
- Participate in collections data management or data publishing
- Are a researcher or end-user of collections data, including graduate students, postdocs, and faculty
- Are a bioinformatician or data scientist
- Work for a standards organization
- Work for a technology vendor or CMS developer
- Work as an educator
- Work for a publisher or journal
- Possess expertise on legal, regulatory or ethical issues related to data management
Phase 2 Consultation Topics:
- Well-founded access points and data cyberinfrastructure alignment
- Persistent identifier scheme(s)
- Meeting legal, regulatory, ethical, and sensitive data obligations
- Workforce capacity development and inclusion
- Transactional mechanisms and provenance
- Partnerships to collaborate more effectively
NSC Alliance, GBIF, BCoN, ALA, DiSSCo, iDigBio, and TDWG, among others, invite you to contribute to this consultation, which aims to expand participation in the process, build support for further collaboration, identify key use cases, and develop an initial roadmap for community adoption and implementation. To read more about the background for this consultation click here.