Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Wouter Addink (wouter.addink@naturalis.nl)
Received: 13 Sep 2023 | Published: 14 Sep 2023
© 2023 Wouter Addink, Sam Leeflang, Sharif Islam
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Addink W, Leeflang S, Islam S (2023) A Simple Recipe for Cooking your AI-assisted Dish to Serve it in the International Digital Specimen Architecture. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e112678. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.112678
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With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a large set of new tools and services is emerging that supports specimen data mapping, standards alignment, quality enhancement and enrichment of the data. These tools currently operate in isolation, targeted to individual collections, collection management systems and institutional datasets. To address this challenge, DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, is developing a new infrastructure for digital specimens, transforming them into actionable information objects. This infrastructure incorporates a framework for annotation and curation that allows the objects to be enriched or enhanced by both experts and machines. This creates the unique possibility to plug-in AI-assisted services that can then leverage digital specimens through this infrastructure, which serves as a harmonised Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) abstraction layer on top of individual institutional systems or datasets. An early example of such services are the ones developed in the Specimen Data Refinery workflow (
The new architecture, DS Arch or Digital Specimen Architecture, is built on the concept of FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) (
AI-assisted services registered with DS Arch, can interact in the same way with all digital specimens worldwide when served through DS Arch with their uniform FDO representation, even if the content richness, level of standardisation and scope of the specimen is different. DS Arch has been designed to serve digital specimens for living and preserved specimens, and preserved environmental, earth system and astrogeology samples. With the AI-assisted services, data can be annotated with new data, alternative values, corrections, and with new entity relationships. As a result, the digital specimens become Digital Extended Specimens enabling new science and application (
We aim to demonstrate in the session how AI-assisted services can be registered and used to annotate specimen data. Although the DiSSCo DS Arch is still in development and planned to become operational in 2025, we already have a sandbox environment available in which the concept can be tested and AI-assisted services can be piloted to act on digital specimen data. For testing purposes, the operations on specimens are currently limited to individual specimens and open data, however batch operations will also be possible in the future production environment.
AI, FDO, DiSSCo, annotation
Wouter Addink
TDWG 2023