In recent years, CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) institutions have started to enrich their collection data with links to semantic resources (e.g. persons or geographical units). In this way, it is possible for the first time to represent distributed collections as a unified information space and to enhance them with various external resources. An example of this approach is this "Botany Pilot", in which diverse data on collectors of botanical specimens are made accessible by linking a reliable and stable person ID (e.g. a so called QID in Wikidata). This includes, for example, biographical data from Wikidata, specimens in different herbarium collections, publications in BHL (Biodiversity Heritage Library) and, more recently, entries from https://bionomia.net/. Based on a single person identifier, the respective information is dynamically pulled together with linked data mechanisms from a growing number of web resources.

Best practices on CETAF identifiers in general are compiled at https://istc.cetaf.org/CETAF_Stable_Identifier_Guide.
For further information you can contact us under email biodiversitydata@bo.berlin.

Participating institutions