13 January 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.
Virtual collections
Virtual collections allow users to (digitally) group specimens based on any chosen criteria—such as geographic region, taxonomy, or research focus—regardless of where the physical specimens are stored. These collections support various purposes: helping researchers locate prototype specimens with high-quality images, enabling personal research sets, supporting machine-learning training data, and facilitating cross-institution exhibitions or collaborations. Because DiSSCo aggregates specimens from many institutes worldwide, virtual collections promote cooperation, shared ownership, and FAIR data principles (FAIR = findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable).
Fig. 1 Working with virtual collections in DiSSCover.
DiSSCover allows users to filter specimens by taxonomy, country, image quality, and other criteria, and then save or share the resulting virtual collection with collaborators. The platform keeps track of relationships between specimens and the virtual collections they belong to, allowing users to trace identifications, metadata standards, and links between objects. This interconnected structure supports transparency and traceability across all specimen-related data.
In the video below, Sam Leeflang, DiSSCo’s lead developer, demonstrates how to build virtual collections with DiSSCover, DiSSCo’s unified system for curation and annotations.
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