During its lifetime, BiCIKL reached significant achievements towards its four key objectives:
Find: Ensure seamless discoverability of data through globally unique identifiers from each participating infrastructure and across data domains. Examples of BICIKL developed and adopted standards for use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) are:
• Improved data discovery at large, including taxon names, specimens, genetic sequences and literature at each participating RI and across RIs, including a central data discovery tool.
• Aligned best practices and standards for use of PIDs for different data classes and their implementation in several BiCIKL RIs.
• Improved bi-directional links between the RIs through the use of PIDs and automated links discovery and validation services.
• A Pan-European system for assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to digital specimens in collections, in collaboration with global stakeholders.
• Recommendations and best practices for use of PIDs in the biodiversity literature.
• Recommendations to infrastructures to use data brokers to link PIDs where competing systems exist.
Access: Provide, facilitate, support and scale up open access to FAIR interlinked data, from literature, natural history collections, sequence archives and taxonomic nomenclature in both human-readable and machine-actionable formats. BiCIKL enhances transnational and virtual access to data via:
• Improved access to FAIR biodiversity data at each RI and across RIs, through 16 newly developed or improved tools and workflows.
• Access to interlinked data through bi-directional and multi-directional linking between RIs.
• Access to Linked Open Data (LOD) through the biodiversity knowledge graphs created or enhanced in BiCIKL.
• Support for access to data and services to Open Call projects proposed by international teams of researchers and to many unnamed users worldwide.
• Development and standardisation of APIs for programmatic access to data at each RI.
Interoperate: Harmonising the existing standards, metadata, policies and technologies for provision and ingestion of FAIR data is developed through joint research & technical development and community engagement and resulted in:
• Recommendations, best practices and guidelines for interoperability and compatible data standards between RIs, for both human and machine-interpretable use (APIs).
• New or improved APIs following the guidelines on technical compliance.
• Guidelines on various aspects of production and use of interlinked FAIR data implemented by several BiCIKL RIs.
• Efficient bi-directional and multi-directional linking mechanisms between specimens, sequences, taxon names, and literature.
• Two policy briefs with recommendations for an increased interoperability of FAIR biodiversity data.
• Best practice manual for findability, re-use and accessibility of RIs.
• Recommendations and best practices included in the BiCIKL training program.
Reuse: Optimisation of the reusability and reproducibility of complex datasets, assembled from different biodiversity-related domains for generation of new knowledge has been progressed through:
• A globally unique, automated workflow for liberation, annotation, dissemination and re-use of data from the biodiversity literature.
• A semantic-based journal production workflow for publication and re-use of FAIR biodiversity data.
• Automated workflow for real-time RDF conversion of full-text articles into Linked Open Data and biodiversity knowledge graph.
• Open Call projects and published articles demonstrate the usability of enhanced interlinked data.
• Community engagement in human-in-the-loop methods of data curation by workbench and clearing house tools.
The workflows and tools created under the joint research activities of BiCIKL are tested in real time through the Open Call projects performed by research groups throughout the world, thus supporting another key objective of BiCIKL and its funding program: Building a new community of users who will be able to address societal challenges through data-driven, next-generation research.
