Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet
BioScience, vol. 72, pp. 978–987
Abstract
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.
Authors 18
-
Affiliation as printed
Cardiff University , Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
-
Elizabeth R. Ellwood corresponding
Florida Museum of Natural History
Affiliation as printed
Florida Museum of Natural History , Gainesville, Florida, United States
-
Florida Museum of Natural History
Affiliation as printed
Florida Museum of Natural History , Gainesville, Florida, United States
-
Affiliation as printed
Museum of Comparative Zoology , Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
-
Affiliation as printed
Statistical Genetics , Ahrensburg, Germany
-
Affiliation as printed
Naturalis Biodiversity Center , Leiden, Netherlands
-
Affiliation as printed
University of Michigan Herbarium , Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
-
Field Museum of Natural History
Affiliation as printed
Field Museum of Natural History , Chicago, Illinois, United States
-
Affiliation as printed
Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas , Lawrence, Kansas, United States
-
Affiliation as printed
University of Florida , Gainesville, Florida, United States
-
Affiliation as printed
Central Michigan University Herbarium, Central Michigan University , Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, United States
-
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Affiliation as printed
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
-
Affiliation as printed
Department of Biological Science, Florida State University , Tallahassee, Florida, United States
-
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Affiliation as printed
Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat , Copenhagen, Denmark
-
Affiliation as printed
Central Michigan University Herbarium, Central Michigan University , Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, United States
-
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Affiliation as printed
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign , Champaign, Illinois, United States
-
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation · Atlas of Living Australia
Affiliation as printed
Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO , Melbourne, Australia
-
Cornell University · Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Affiliation as printed
Macaulay Library, Cornell Lab of Ornithology , Ithaca, New York, United States
Cited by 100 stored of 101
No patents citing this paper on Lens.org (checked 2026-10-11).