The justification
Modern science requires digital access to data. European Natural History collections account for 55% of the collections globally, holding more than 1 billion objects, which represent 80% of the world’s bio- and geo-diversity. Only around 10% of these objects have been digitally catalogued and 1-2% imaged, leaving their information underused. This challenge is being tackled by the new Research Infrastructure (RI) initiative, Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), which has been accepted to ESFRI roadmap. DiSSCo will unify access to European collection data. It will enable critical new insights to address some of the world's greatest challenges, such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. However, new research and technological innovation are required to solve the challenges of efficiently digitising and accessing the collections. ICEDIG project will design the technical, financial, policy and governance aspects for developing and operating DiSSCo.
The effectiveness
Digitalisation of society affects all areas of human activity, and science is at the forefront of this development. Digital science means a transformation of the nature of science and innovation. Emphasis on shared data has led to the concept of “Open Science”. Natural science collections are an integral part of the global natural and cultural capital. They include 2-3 billions of animal, plant, fossil, rock, mineral, and meteorite specimens. The collection data underpin countless innovations, including publications used to support legislative and regulatory processes relating to health, food, security, sustainability and environmental change. Natural science collections have always been open for all scientists and form the hard core of biodiversity science. Currently the availability of data hinders modern science as research requires access to data digitally to address some of the biggest challenges of our time such as understanding the impact of global change and biodiversity loss, and the effect of climate change on ecosystems. Biodiversity loss and extinctions, and the associated loss of ecosystem function, are leading to a situation where a substantial part of the world’s biodiversity are lost even before we understand their value. We need to accelerate the discovery of species, which can only be done by accelerating scientific cooperation, data sharing, and more effective use of biological collections. DiSSCo RI will unify access to the European collections and facilitate innovations that streamline digitisation of physical collections.
The solutions
The objective of the ICEDIG project is to lay the groundwork for DiSSCo RI, which can enable digitisation of physical collections in an industrial fashion and scale while being also cost-effective. Firstly, by supporting the technological innovations needed to efficiently digitise a billion collection objects in a foreseeable time, and secondly to consolidate the organisation that needs to perform this task. Thereafter, the natural science community will be a fully enabled player in digital society, and the most fundamental scientific data on the diversity of life on earth will be freely and openly available for all.
The conclusions
The synthesis from results of the ICEDIG project, the DiSSCo Conceptual Design Blueprint (
https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.6.e54280(opens in new window)) covers the organisational arrangements, processes and practices, the architecture, tools and technologies, culture, skills and capacity building and governance and business model proposals for constructing the digitisation infrastructure of DiSSCo. DiSSCo must be interpreted as an infrastructure (machinery, processing, procedures, personnel, organisation) offering Europe-wide capabilities for mass digitisation and digitisation-on-demand, and for the subsequent management (i.e. curation, publication, processing) and use of the resulting data. The blueprint constitutes the essential background needed to continue work to raise the overall maturity of the DiSSCo Programme across multiple dimensions (organisational, technical, scientific, data, financial) to achieve readiness to begin construction.
