24 August 2026
Text by DiSSCo CSO
As DiSSCo unifies European natural science collections into a synchronized digital infrastructure, maintaining scientific quality and data trust is critical. The Annotation Validation Framework (AVF) will establish the technical and organizational governance needed to continuously enrich, correct, and update Digital Specimens. Rather than acting as a rigid gatekeeper, the framework balances open, community-driven scientific contributions with scientific rigor and institutional collection sovereignty.
Key highlights of the framework include:
● Layered Data Architecture: A 4-layer model (from Base Primary Data to the Consensus “Single Point of Truth”) that allows raw community discussions, machine-generated insights, and verified onsensus views to coexist transparently.
● Impact-Based Routing & Promotion: Automated classification pathways that streamline low-impact metadata cleanups via automated/two-agent rules, while routing high-impact scientific revisions (such as taxonomic re-identifications) to dedicated Expert Groups and Data Custodians.
● FAIR Digital Object Integrity: Full provenance tracking for all annotations whether generated by human experts, citizen scientists, or Machine Annotation Services.
● Consumer Lenses: Flexible filtering mechanisms that allow researchers and data aggregators (e.g., GBIF) to select their required threshold of trust.
A first open meeting on the AVF will take place on August 27, 2026 from 5pm to 6pm (CEST). The meeting will allow for a first discussion on the topic and a preliminary session to collect feedback. You can find the Zoom link below.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88996526747
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