A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people.

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection data, starting with data on people, and to link them via a central index system. As a result, it is now possible to query data on collectors across different collections and automatically link them to a variety of external resources. The system is being continuously developed and is already in production use in an international collection portal.

Toward a service-based workflow for automated information extraction from herbarium specimens.

Over the past years, herbarium collections worldwide have started to digitize millions of specimens on an industrial scale. Although the imaging costs are steadily falling, capturing the accompanying label information is still predominantly done manually and develops into the principal cost factor. In order to streamline the process of capturing herbarium specimen metadata, we specified a formal extensible workflow integrating a wide range of automated specimen image analysis services. We implemented the workflow on the basis of OpenRefine together with a plugin for handling service calls and responses. The evolving system presently covers the generation of optical character recognition (OCR) from specimen images, the identification of regions of interest in images and the extraction of meaningful information items from OCR. These implementations were developed as part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded a standardised and optimised process for data acquisition from digital images of herbarium specimens (StanDAP-Herb) Project.

Actionable, long-term stable and semantic web compatible identifiers for access to biological collection objects.

With biodiversity research activities being increasingly shifted to the web, the need for a system of persistent and stable identifiers for physical collection objects becomes increasingly pressing. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities agreed on a common system of HTTP-URI-based stable identifiers which is now rolled out to its member organizations. The system follows Linked Open Data principles and implements redirection mechanisms to human-readable and machine-readable representations of specimens facilitating seamless integration into the growing semantic web. The implementation of stable identifiers across collection organizations is supported with open source provider software scripts, best practices documentations and recommendations for RDF metadata elements facilitating harmonized access to collection information in web portals. Database URL: : http://cetaf.org/cetaf-stable-identifiers.