SYNTHESYS+ Abridged Grant Proposal

Abstract

European natural history collections are a critical infrastructure for meeting the most important challenge humans face over the next 30 years – creating a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend – and for answering fundamental scientific questions about ecological, evolutionary, and geological processes. Since 2004 SYNTHESYS has been an essential instrument supporting this community, underpinning new ways to access and exploit collections, harmonising policy and providing significant new insights for thousands of researchers, while fostering the development of new approaches to face urgent societal challenges. SYNTHESYS+ is a fourth iteration of this programme, and represents a step change in the evolution of this community. For the first time SYNTHESYS+ brings together the European branches of the global natural science organisations (GBIF https://www.gbif.org/, TDWG https://www.tdwg.org/, GGBN http://www.ggbn.org/ggbn_portal/ and CETAF https://cetaf.org/) with an unprecedented number of collections, to integrate, innovate and internationalise our efforts within the global scientific collections community. Major new developments addressed by SYNTHESYS+ include the delivery of a new virtual access programme, providing digitisation on demand services to a significantly expanded user community; the construction of a European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) providing, for the first time, a unified gateway to accessing digital, physical and molecular collections; and a new data processing platform (the Specimen Data Refinery), applying cutting edge artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the digital mobilisation of natural history collections. The activities of SYNTHESYS+ form a critical dependency for DiSSCo - the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (https://dissco.eu/), which is the European Research Infrastructure for natural science collections, under the ESFRI umbrella. DiSSCo will undertake the maintenance and sustainability of SYNTHESYS+ products at the end of the programme.

Knowledge Organization and the UN 2030 Agenda Through the Lens of Interoperability

“…Special focus is given to the problem of interoperability, to overcome previously identified shortcomings, and a work package of the project is dedicated to it. This project lays the foundations for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCO), an infrastructure that will bring together collections from 115 European museums from 21 countries (Smith et al 2019).…”

Landscape Analysis for the Specimen Data Refinery

“…Institutional digitisation workflows have tended to focus on processing individual specimens and their metadata one-by-one rather than developing large-scale software-based tools to automate capturing computable data about multiple specimens at once. The SYNTHESYS+ project is addressing this gap using technologies developed to harvest, organise, analyse and enhance information from other sources (such as books, photographs and maps), offering the prospect of greatly accelerated data capture through a Specimen Data Refinery (Smith et al 2019).…”

Incorporating RDA Outputs in the Design of a European Research Infrastructure for Natural Science Collections

“…We use the term 'Digital Specimen' (explained below) in an analogous manner. 2 Existing systems for exploiting material stored in NSCs are inefficient and not cost-effective (Smith et al 2019). Despite significant work by global data infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), 3 Biodiversity Heritage Library, 4 and Plazi TreatmentBank, 5 there remain systematic gaps in linking specimen data to other data classes such as DNA sequences, literature, functional traits, habitat and conservation data and ecological models (Page 2016;Senderov et al 2018).…”