17 December 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.
Machine annotations
Issues such as scarce digitisation of natural collections, institutional silos, and manual coordination are hindering the efforts of the scientific community. To overcome this, DiSSCo emphasises AI-based automation to expand access, annotate data, and integrate collections across institutions.
DiSSCo is developing a distributed platform to harmonise data from over 800 institutions, enabling generic tools to operate across collections regardless of location. Core functionalities include assigning DOIs, tracking provenance, annotating data, and creating links between specimens and external resources like DNA databases or biodiversity aggregators (digital extended specimen). Tools like DiSSCover are built on top of this infrastructure, providing both human-oriented services for researchers and machine annotation services for automated data enhancement.
Screenshot of machine annotation in DiSSCover.
The video below presents several practical examples of machine annotation, including machine-driven georeferencing, entity linking, and image analysis. These services allow rapid digitisation of previously inaccessible or unstructured specimens, creating linked and FAIR-compliant records. The system also supports feedback and annotation evaluation, ensuring quality control and enabling institutions without extensive IT support to participate.
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