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

Abstract

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

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“…Existing RDF providers, such as members of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), adopt this approach (Güntsch et al 2017). In contrast, describe a more elaborate model of an occurrence that separates entities, such as events, localities, identifications, and specimens.…”

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“…Recently, the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF; http://cetaf.org/) adopted the approach of using actionable, web-based uniform resource identifiers (http-URIs) for physical objects (Güntsch et al, 2017). The advantage of this approach is the immediate linkage of the physical object with its digital representation.…”