Digital Collection Infrastructures

The Digital Collection Infrastructures team provides digital services to enable FAIR research data management of Senckenberg’s geo- and biodiversity collections. This includes the provision of the Collection Management System (CMS) for digital specimen information and the presentation and scientific exploitation of collection data.

We are actively engaged in national and international cooperations and research consortia aimed at developing novel approaches to interlink, harmonize and facilitate access to research data. These initiatives pave the way for new large-scale, cross-domain data-driven research approaches powered by artificial intelligence methods.

Our services and projects:

• Creation of Senckenberg’s new Collection Management System including the public interface at search.senckenberg.de
• WildLIVE. Für unser Projekt WildLIVE! stellen wir an vielen Standorten Wildkameras auf. Als „Citizen-Scientist“, also als Bürgerwissenschaftler:in, bestimmen Sie die Tierarten auf den Fotos. So entsteht ein wertvoller Datensatz für Wissenschaftler:innen. Dieser ermöglicht uns die Beantwortung spannender Fragen.   Mit den Daten trainieren wir außerdem eine künstliche Intelligenz, die Fotos irgendwann selbstständig analysieren soll. Wir möchten mit unseren Projekten langfristig Landschaftsschutz vor Ort zu betreiben – und zwar mit Bürgerwissenschaft und mit einer KI.
• The NFDI4Earth is a consortium of more than 60 German research institutions and a community process to improve access to FAIR research data in the earth system sciences. We are responsible for standardization efforts for existing community infrastructures as well as for designing and implementing key infrastructures that will be operated by the NFDI4Earth. 
• BITS (BluePrints for the Integration of Terminology Services in Earth System Sciences) is a joint project of Senckenberg, TIB and DKRZ. BITS aims to address a major remaining obstacle to the application of FAIR principles in Earth System Science (ESS) by addressing the inadequate implementation of encoding semantics or, in other words, data interoperability of research data. 
• FAIRagro is an NFDI consortium pioneering a research data management system for agrosystem research. Within FAIRagro, we develop models and workflows that enable researchers to create, share and link their research data in a FAIR manner.
• BioDT. Our task aims to foster joint usage and FAIR sharing of data from different domains. This will address the specific nature of different types of Digital Twins, different levels of the computation tasks, various VRE platforms, heterogeneous data sources, multiple software stacks and data provenance to ensure seamless integration and usage. The work will leverage infrastructure developed in the ELIXIR tools platform and the EOSC-Life Tool and Workflow Collaboratory. This means community-developed schemas, registration in resources (WorkflowHub) and standards (RO-Crate / Common Workflow Language) will also be integrated.