Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet

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Issue Date
2022-08-03Author
Hardisty, Alex R.
Ellwood, Elizabeth R.
Nelson, Gil
Zimkus, Breda
Buschbom, Jutta
Addink, Wouter
Rabeler, Richard K.
Bates, John
Bentley, Andrew
Fortes, José A. B.
Hansen, Sara
Macklin, James A.
Mast, Austin R.
Miller, Joseph T.
Monfils, Anna K.
Paul, Deborah L.
Wallis, Elycia
Webster, Michael
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
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Show full item recordAbstract
The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information. In the present article, we propose a new interconnected network of digital objects on the Internet—the Digital Extended Specimen (DES) network—that transcends existing aggregator technology, augments the DES with third-party data through machine algorithms, and provides a platform for more efficient research and robust interdisciplinary discovery.
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Citation
Alex R Hardisty, et al., Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet, BioScience, Volume 72, Issue 10, October 2022, Pages 978–987, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac060
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.