At the current rate of digitization, it is estimated that it would take hundreds of years to fully digitize the natural science collections of Europe. In the face of the biodiversity crisis, we urgently need to scale up digitization to equip researchers with the tools to tackle this challenge.

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections, DiSSCo, is a fully open source European infrastructure that is bringing together over 300 institutions into a unified, digital natural science collection. DiSSCo harmonizes data into one data model and enables sharing human expertise and machine services across institutions.

Through annotating specimen records on the platform, experts from around the world can contribute to curation and enhancement of data. Most crucially, taxonomists, whose expertise is highly specialized and sought after, can easily share their knowledge and improve specimen data across institutions.

Leveraging a shared data model, machine agents can further improve and enhance specimen data, through linking to other infrastructures, georeferencing, and even label transcription. Instead of being confined to a single institution, services adapted for DiSSCo can be applied to any specimen in Europe, breaking institutional silos and furthering collaboration.

These efforts culminate in a digital extended specimen, which acts as a “digital twin” to the physical object, with links to publications, genetic sequences, and other related information.

This presentation gives an overview of the progress of the DiSSCo infrastructure, collaboration with researchers and collection managers, and the future of DiSSCo’s development.

https://disscover.dissco.eu/ https://github.com/diSSCo