Sustaining a biodiversity data infrastructure:

OpenUp!, BioCASe and GBIF

Walter Berendsohn

Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-DahlemFreie Universität Berlin

www.open-up.eu

www.open-up.eu

The OpenUp! consortium

Museum of Natural History

www.open-up.eu

• Implementing a sustainable pipeline from natural history collections to the European Virtual Library, Europeana,

• using BioCASE technology, and contributing to GBIF.

• Complemented with a system for – Data quality control – Data transformation – Semantic enrichment, including the

common names of species in various languages

to support data providers and facilitate access to natural history contentthrough the Europeana portal (and GBIF).

Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow

www.open-up.eu

OpenUp! Data Quality Toolkit

BioCASE Monitor

OpenUp! Helpdesk

BioCASE Helpdesk

Assistance to data providers(275 PM for local data quality enhancements)

Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow– serving the collectionBioCASE

BioCASEBioCASE

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BioCASEBioCASE

BioCASE

Enhanced data provision to GBIF

The OpenUp! information flow – serving global networks

www.open-up.eu

BioCASEBioCASE

BioCASE

Harvester

The OpenUp! information flow– harvesting

www.open-up.eu

BioCASEBioCASE

BioCASE

Harvester

ABCD ESEEDM

Metadata enhancements(e.g. common names, synonyms)

The OpenUp! information flow– semantic enrichment

www.open-up.eu

BioCASEBioCASE

BioCASE

Harvester

OAI-PM

H

Harvester

ABCD ESEEDM

The OpenUp! information flow– to Europeana and other virtual libraries

www.open-up.eu

BioCASEBioCASE

BioCASE

Harvester

OAI-PM

H

Harvester

ABCD ESEEDM

1,5 Mio multimedia records mobilisedOne of the 10 largest content providers in Europeana

Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow– works!

www.open-up.eu

E.g.: referral from the Europeana site to BGBM

Search example: Abrus precatorius

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Benefits for institutions• Increased web traffic to institutional websites

– BGBM: for the past 6 months average of 10% referrals from Europeana– RBGK: referrals from the Europeana site represented 28% of all visits to Kew’s

Herbarium Catalogue in February 2013; 24% over the six-month period of 1 September 2012 to 28 February 2013

• Common standard for information provision to networks like GBIF

• Common standard for information provision to virtual libraries

• Data quality enhancements at the source

• Specialisation of individual institutions– Botanical name service– Zoological name service– Common name service– Helpdesk

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The last project year: ensuring sustainability

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• BioCASE Provider Software: open-source, system-independent (maintenance BGBM Berlin); supporting toolkits (MfN Berlin, BGBM Berlin, RBG Kew, …)

• Further BioCASE development under SYNTHESYS 3 (DNA-Bank Network) and various national projects

• Source data mobilisation up and running at NH collections

• Helpdesk system established at RMCA Tervuren and BGBM

• Natural History Aggregator database: NHM London; 3 mirrors established (NBGB Meise, NHM Copenhagen, BGBM Berlin)

• Common names services by NHM Vienna

• Training and updating documentation: MRAC under EU-BON

Sustainability: most problems solved

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Costs of sustaining the OpenUp! infrastructure

• Sustainability not yet ensured for the aggregation process incl. indexing, testing and communications with Europeana

• Project partner is a company (AIT – Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Graz; engaged in a wide array of Europeana-related EU projects)

• Costs depend on number of ingests/year, number of data sources, number of new providers (technical support to be covered by BioCASE helpdesk)

• Cost estimate: Euro 2,000 to 5,000 p.a.

• The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) has been approached with Service Level Agreement proposal