Collections, aggregators, data re-packagers, publishers, researchers, and external user groups form a complex web of data connections and pipelines. This forms the natural history infrastructure essential for collections use by an ever increasing and diverse external user community. We have made great strides in developing the individual actors within this system and we are now well poised to utilize these capabilities to address big picture questions. We need to continue work on the individual aspects, but the focus now needs to be on integration of the functionality provided by the actors involved in the pipeline to facilitate the transfer of data between them with as few human interventions as possible. In order for the system to function efficiently and to the benefit of all parties, information, data, and resources need not only to be integrated efficiently but flow in the reverse direction (attribution) to facilitate collections advocacy and sustainability. There are unrealized benefits to collections from inclusion into aggregators and subsequent use by researchers and publishers. A recent National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) needs assessment workshop identified a possible solution to the integration and attribution of collections data and specimen information using a suite of unique, persistent identifiers for specimen records (Universally Unique Identifiers or UUIDs), datasets (Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs) and institutions/collections (Cool Uniform Resource Identifiers or Cool URIs). This talk will highlight this potential workflow and the work needed to achieve this solution while soliciting participation from actors in the pipeline and the community at large.

Integration, attribution, BCoN, NSF, unique identifiers

Andrew Bentley