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]
