26 November 2025
For several years now, DiSSCo has promised a true digital transformation for natural history collections (NHCs). Now, some of the core services and developments of the future Research Infrastructure have reached the level of maturity necessary to demonstrate the feasibility of such a transformation. The series of posts about DiSSCo applications aims to introduce some of the developments that are already making a difference for biodiversity research and collection management.
User Groups
The DiSSCo technical team at Naturalis is working with a reduced group of early adopters or “users group”. It brings together collection managers, researchers, and taxonomists to understand existing workflows and practical needs and priorities. The group is the result of a shift in how DiSSCo approaches its technical development—from a system-centered perspective to a user-centered one that places users, rather than technology, at the core of every new feature of our architecture.
Andres Rivera (center), researcher at Naturalis and a member of DiSSCo users group.
Through this collaboration, several high-priority needs have been identified. The most important one is improving how Naturalis data can be enriched by the wider expert community, particularly taxonomists. This requires simplifying the annotation flow, designing policies for validating community annotations, and enabling validated data to (reliably) return to collection management systems.
Looking ahead, the team has identified further opportunities for DiSSCo to support the group, including enabling virtual collections for specimen comparison, accelerating digitisation, and leveraging machine-learning tools for bulk annotation and specimen grouping. Some of these capabilities already exist technically, while others require new development and alignment with the collection’s strategy.
Do you want to know more about the technical side of DiSSCo? DiSSCo puts different technical knowledge platforms at the scientific community’s disposal:
DiSSCoTech: Get the latest technical posts about the design of DiSSCo’s Infrastructure
DiSSCo GitHub: Code hosting for DiSSCo software, version control and collaboration
DiSSCo Modelling Framework: A WikiBase tool that is configured to create an abstraction of the DiSSCo data model