The scientists, particularly those associated with natural history museums and botanical gardens collectively hold large number of multimedia data like pictures, sounds, movies about specimens in his collections. This multimedia content is held in different kinds of databases and therefore is only currently available to those few people who can gain direct access to the databases. The attractive multimedia is thus effectively withheld from use for a wide range of scientific applications, which includes research, education, taxonomic study, biodiversity conservation, protected area management, and maintenance of diverse ecosystem services. Therefore a project which would provide this multimedia content with specific biological and multilingual functionality to a wide European cultural audience through EUROPEANA was proposed. The inclusion of culturally-significant multimedia content from European natural history collections (i.e., more than 1 million pictures, artwork, movies, and audio files) will enhance the scientific dimension of EUROPEANA by adding substantial information about the natural world complementing the digital biodiversity literature, and in addition to the existing material primarily from the arts and humanities. A consortium leading by Freie Universitaet Berlin was established to work together on the proposed aims under the EU project OpenUp!. The members of consortium are 23 scientific institutions from 12 different European countries. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
BiSciCol (Biological Science Collections) Tracker is a funded NSF collaborative project with the goal of building an infrastructure designed to tag and track scientific collections and all of their derivatives. Scientific collections created and used in basic research are an integral part of our scientific infrastructure. Individual specimens in these collections serve as the anchor for an expanding array of information that grows and changes with time about the specimen and the group that the specimen represents. Unfortunately, as we all know, specimens and subsamples are scattered geographically across institutions. Taxonomic, genomic, geospatial, and other information about the specimens is also scattered across independent computer systems and on paper, and are very difficult to access or synthesize. Current data sharing systems such as DigIR are one-way channels and do not allow for quick and easy two-way linking of information or updates as new knowledge is gained. The BiSciCol team will take the appropriate next steps to address a community-wide challenge facing the biological collections community – linking and tracking scientific collection objects (specimens, sequences, images, etc.) and their digital metadata across multiple institutional collections with heterogeneous information management systems. In current distributed data systems (e.g., GBIF, MANIS, HerpNET, ORNIS), information is passed one-way from data providers to users. No mechanism exists to tag or annotate collection objects and link information to other collection objects or data records and back to the original collections. Our deliverables include 1) develop a tracking and annotation system based on globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) and ontological relationships; 2) deploy this system and others in a Virtual Information Appliance (VIA) as a Virtual Machine (VM); and 3) document and implement a set of use cases and practices, based on characteristic physical and digital workflows in the community. ... [Information of the supplier]
Our vision of the Humboldt Digital Library goes beyond the traditional system. Humboldt's idea of interconnectedness requires a system of flexible navigation from any point in the digital library to any other related point within or outside Humboldt's works. A further innovative feature of this dynamic system is that it can recreate the context of a particular passage and make it possible to view images, interactive maps, and information about plants, animals, and scientific facts relevant to Humboldt's observations. Although the digital library contributes by making rare books accessible, the greatest advantage of the system will be its capacity to connect data from diverse locations in Humboldt's twenty-nine volumes and allow comparison with modern scientific knowledge and developments. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
