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Executive summary of the Be.DiSSCo-FED project

Sarting the 1st of March 2024.
 

 

Background to the project

The DiSSCo Research Infrastructure is now entering its implementation phase. The main financed partners of BE.DiSSCo-FED will be RBINS (member of the DiSSCo interim General Assembly - iGA) and RMCA (observer at the DiSSCo iGA). The project aims at strengthening the roles of these two federal institutions in the framework of DiSSCO at European and Belgian levels. RBINS will also strengthen its role as (proposed) National Node and as partner of the upcoming DiSSCo Transition European project (2023-2025), the last project before the creation of the ERIC and the RI construction phase.

RBINS contributed in DiSSCo Prepare, under the governance pillar, to the selection of the legal entity model (ERIC) and the drafting of the Statutes. The Institute collaborated also with CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) on the development of a Specialization tool, a prototype platform allowing the gathering, categorizing, storage and analysis of NH collections related information. These emanate from the core activities of DiSSCo community as existing data or to be developed by the Collections holding institutions and National Nodes. The prototype must now (2023) be implemented at the European RI and global scale and be ready for the integration of Natural History collections related data from more than 100 institutions.

 

Belgian context

Be.DiSSCo-FED aims at reinforcing the participation of two Belgian Federal Scientific Institutions, the Royal Belgian Museum of Natural Sciences, and the Royal Museum of Central Africa, in the DiSCCo distributed research infrastructure. DiSSCo ESFRI is one of the eligible research infrastructures in the frame of the current call. It entered its implementation phase early in 2023, with the completion of its preparatory phase.

The consortium has been set up to be as inclusive as possible, including also as non-funded partners: 

  • Meise Botanical Garden – for its collections but also as coordinator of the DiSSCo-Flanders project that gathers all the current 11 signatories of the DiSCCo MoU –, 
  • the two major French-speaking universities that have not signed the MoU (UMons and ULiège) 
  • and the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities, a Belgian international non-profit association, that is part of the DiSSCo Coordination and Support Office.


The project has several dimensions that will allow to better position the two FSIs (and, RBINS as agreed National Node) in both the Belgian and the European DiSSCo landscapes: 

  • Organisational aspects of the Belgian consortium, 
  • Knowledge and technology transfer, refinement and concrete testing with the Belgian information of a tool developed during the preparatory phase (“Specialization plan”) for the whole DiSSCo community, 
  • Implementation of new IT methods to catalogue collections in a standardized system, efforts to federate the most significant Belgian collections, 
  • Evaluate and propose a standardized solution for the hosting, the sharing and the vizualisation tools of the multimedia files resulting from the digitisation of the natural history specimens. 

 

Objectives of Be.DiSSCo-FED

Be.DiSSCo-FED aims at strengthening the roles of RBINS (member of the DiSSCo interim General Assembly - iGA) and RMCA (observer at the DiSSCo iGA) in the framework of DiSSCO at European and Belgian levels. It will also help the RBINS to achieve its tasks in the DiSSCo Transition proposal.
RBINS already contributed in DiSSCo Prepare (DPP), under the business framework (DPP WP4) and governance (DPP WP7) pillars, to the selection of the legal entity model (ERIC) and the drafting of the Statutes. The Institute collaborated also with CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) on the development of the Specialization tool, a prototype allowing to collect information related to the core activities of DiSSCo existing within and to be developed by the institutions and National Nodes (NN). The prototype must now (2023) be implemented at the global scale, and the data must be entered by more than 100 institutions. 

One task of Be.DiSSCo-FED will be to analyse all the specialization data gathered in the tool to define a clear specialization strategy for the DiSSCo infrastructure. 

  1. Be.DiSSCo-FED will therefore analyse all the specialization data gathered in the tool to define a clear specialization strategy for the DiSSCo infrastructure at the Belgian level. The associated research and development will focus on a) the analysis of data related to the collections, the research fields, the scientific infrastructures/instruments, the exhibitions, and the trainings as well as on b) the integration of these data in dedicated visualisation and decision tools. RBINS will collaborate with the Belgian institutions relevant for DiSSCo (with or without signed MoU). The integration of these data in dedicated visualisation and management decision tools. RBINS will collaborate on this two-fold technical (?) developments with the Belgian institutions relevant for DiSSCo (whether they have or not yet signed an MoU with the DiSSCo.eu partnership). 
  2. Another task will focus on the persistent identifier (PID) of collections. Both CETAF collections dashboard and DiSSCo Prepare specialization plan propose a hierarchy of the main DiSSCo  collections and sub-collections. This hierarchy must be linked to the GrSciColl inventory and its Collection identification system. The goal is to use the diversity of the Belgian collections to develop and test a standardized identification of the collections, and to propose a dedicated strategy and tailored tools to the DiSSCo community. The Be.DiSSCo-FED proposal will also work on the standardization of the Description of the collections using the Latimer Core proposed by TDWG and to the standardization of the multimedia files produced by the High-Resolution digitization of the specimens, to allow a FAIR access by Humans and machines.
  3. Finally, Be.DiSSCo-FED will focus on the standardization of the multimedia files resulting of the digitization of the collections and evaluate Open-Source solutions to share and visualize 2D, 2D+, 3D and internal structures data with human and machines using internationally recognized standard(s).