Research Infrastructure Contact Zones: a framework and dataset to characterise the activities of major biodiversity informatics initiatives.

Background: 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. New information: 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.

Actionable, long-term stable and semantic web compatible identifiers for access to biological collection objects.

With biodiversity research activities being increasingly shifted to the web, the need for a system of persistent and stable identifiers for physical collection objects becomes increasingly pressing. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities agreed on a common system of HTTP-URI-based stable identifiers which is now rolled out to its member organizations. The system follows Linked Open Data principles and implements redirection mechanisms to human-readable and machine-readable representations of specimens facilitating seamless integration into the growing semantic web. The implementation of stable identifiers across collection organizations is supported with open source provider software scripts, best practices documentations and recommendations for RDF metadata elements facilitating harmonized access to collection information in web portals. Database URL: : http://cetaf.org/cetaf-stable-identifiers.