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Many natural science collections (NSCs) and museums keep information about collectors and other collection agents affiliated with their specimens and respective institution in internal catalogues, databases or wikis. Despite the fact that people data are crucial for linking collection objects, expeditions, publications, archival material, correspondence, etc. (Page 2016, Groom et al. 2020), such data are often only available internally, with limited or no access for external users. In the past, collectors have often been active in multiple fields, gathering e.g., zoological and botanical as well as ethnological or anthropological objects. This transdisciplinary collecting practice, in addition to the tradition of exchanging duplicates between institutions, results in a large overlap of people affiliated with different collections. Opening up available data will improve data quality in collection databases, support the disambiguation of collection agents (Dillen et al. 2021) and allow cross-disciplinary reuse of the data. Within a pilot study conducted at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), the information kept in an internal “MfN collector wiki” is made available via Wikidata. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that is collaborative and multilingual, and can be edited by anyone in the world. Wikidata stores structured data that are both human and machine readable, and it serves as a hub/broker for other identifiers (Vrandečić and Krötzsch 2014). An innovative open participatory approach is taken using edit-a-thons, involving MfN staff (collection manager, scientific heads of collections, scientists, etc.) to add and update information ‘passively’ available within the institution, and the wider public, e.g., citizen scientists and other interested parties. MfN staff (collection manager, scientific heads of collections, scientists, etc.) to add and update information ‘passively’ available within the institution, and the wider public, e.g., citizen scientists and other interested parties. Wikidata items are newly created or updated and enriched with additional information, also linking to collections, archives, and libraries. In this talk we will present the method and preliminary results of our study. One focus will be ‘hidden champions’ such as women scientists and local collectors, to make their contribution to global natural heritage visible. Another focus will be on collections from the era of European colonial expansion until the beginning of the 20th century, especially the former German colony, Cameroon. The number of institutions openly sharing data is increasing. However, following the TDWG 2022 conference motto “Stronger together”, we call for others to join in sharing data using persistent (people) identifiers and standards.

ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data, Holetschek et al. 2012) 2.06 was ratified by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) in September 2005. In 2017, TDWG ratified the Standards Documentation Standard (SDS, Vocabulary Maintenance Specification Task Group 2017), which is a set of regulations and guidelines on how TDWG standards should be structured and documented. Since then, ABCD has been classified with “2005 standards” on the TDWG standards website. However, with the planned ratifications of the ABCD Extension for Geoscience (ABCD EFG, Petersen et al. 2018) and the more semantic ABCD 3.0 (Fichtmueller et al. 2019), it became necessary to also ratify ABCD 2.06 under the SDS rules. In this talk, we will report on the progress of the ratification processes, both for ABCD 2.06 and ABCD EFG. In particular we want to address the specific challenges that arose from fitting existing XML schemas into the SDS structure and documenting them accordingly.

All organizations need clear and succinct mission and vision statements to communicate the purpose and overall goals of the group. These products provide the foundation for development of long(er) term strategic planning including communication plans. Logos offer us another way to highlight and brand what we do and why we do it. Periodically, for all organizations, these all need to be reviewed. The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Outreach and Communication Subcommittee took on this challenge and started a process to re-assess our current identity as presented in the existing original vision, mission, and logo. From the beginning, the subcommittee decided to follow a bottom-up method and invite all members to contribute to this process and refine its results. Community members had observed that the current logo, a simple lettering of the abbreviated old name and the organization's current name, needed to be revised to be more memorable and fit for use not only on the website, but for everything from slide decks to hex stickers for laptops. Similarly, some noted the mission and vision statements were combined and included other information like “how” TDWG works on its community-driven mission to make biodiversity data accessible. It was time to refresh TDWG’s brand with the additional challenge to keep reflecting the current values and long-standing traditions that characterize the community through a new more modern glass. Notable keys to our success in moving these goals forward started with leadership of the Outreach & Communications Committee Chair, from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and the facilitation and expertise of a Communication (Comms) and Outreach specialist from DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections). Having the skills and knowledge of the Comms person meant we benefited from a clear step-by-step process. All involved learned a lot about what to do, to expect, and whom to engage in the future for any similar reviews in other groups. In this talk, we'll take you on this journey and present the new products of the community-led process: TDWG’s Mission, Vision and the new logo. This is, however, just the starting point and there is more work to be done. The next step would be the development of a strategic plan based on this foundation as TDWG continues to work on inclusion, increased global participation, recognition of our expertise, and strategic leadership in the creation, maintenance, implementation, and adoption of our standards.

In the last two decades, various projects and initiatives have conducted research on how to share, exchange, and link information from natural science collection objects. This profound (technical) knowledge, standards, tools, and best practices are essential to the development of any new research infrastructure facilitating research on bio- and geodiversity. However, the knowledge and research results are usually not easily accessible at a single point and particularly not in a well-curated form. Here, the Knowledgebase developed for the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) comes into play. This information hub will act as trusted source for project outcomes and other relevant resources (e.g., web services, Persistent Identifier Systems, controlled vocabularies, domain-specific ontologies and standards) for users and developers of DiSSCo and other research infrastructures worldwide. In this talk, we will present the current version of the DiSSCo Knowledgebase, its developmental approach, and the opportunity for this source to act as an e-service for various stakeholder groups interested in and working with natural science collections worldwide.

Digitisation and publication of museum specimen data is happening worldwide, but far from complete. Museums can start by sharing what they know about their holdings at a higher level, long before each object has its own record. Information about what is held in collections worldwide is needed by many stakeholders including collections managers, funders, researchers, policy-makers, industry, and educators. To aggregate this information from collections, the data need to be standardised (Johnston and Robinson 2002). So, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Task Group is developing a data standard for describing collections, which gives the ability to provide: automated metrics, using standardised collection descriptions and/or data derived from specimen datasets (e.g., counts of specimens) and a global registry of physical collections (i.e., digitised or non-digitised). automated metrics, using standardised collection descriptions and/or data derived from specimen datasets (e.g., counts of specimens) and a global registry of physical collections (i.e., digitised or non-digitised). Outputs will include a data model to underpin the new standard, and guidance and reference implementations for the practical use of the standard in institutional and collaborative data infrastructures. The Task Group employs a community-driven approach to standard development. With international participation, workshops at the Natural History Museum (London 2019) and the MOBILISE workshop (Warsaw 2020) allowed over 50 people to contribute this work. Our group organized online "barbecues" (BBQs) so that many more could contribute to standard definitions and address data model design challenges. Cloud-based tools (e.g., GitHub, Google Sheets) are used to organise and publish the group's work and make it easy to participate. A Wikibase instance is also used to test and demonstrate the model using real data. There are a range of global, regional, and national initiatives interested in the standard (see Task Group charter). Some, like GRSciColl (now at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)), Index Herbariorum (IH), and the iDigBio US Collections List are existing catalogues. Others, including the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) and the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), include collection descriptions as a key part of their near-term development plans. As part of the EU-funded SYNTHESYS+ project, GBIF organized a virtual workshop: Advancing the Catalogue of the World's Natural History Collections to get international input for such a resource that would use this CD standard. Some major complexities present themselves in designing a standardised approach to represent collection descriptions data. It is not the first time that the natural science collections community has tried to address them (see the TDWG Natural Collections Description standard). Beyond natural sciences, the library community in particular gave thought to this (Heaney 2001, Johnston and Robinson 2002), noting significant difficulties. One hurdle is that collections may be broken down into different degrees of granularity according to different criteria, and may also overlap so that a single object can be represented in more than one collection description. Managing statistics such as numbers of objects is complex due to data gaps and variable degrees of certainty about collection contents. It also takes considerable effort from collections staff to generate structured data about their undigitised holdings. We need to support simple, high-level collection summaries as well as detailed quantitative data, and to be able to update as needed. We need a simple approach, but one that can also handle the complexities of data, scope, and social needs, for digitised and undigitised collections. The data standard itself is a defined set of classes and properties that can be used to represent groups of collection objects and their associated information. These incorporate common characteristics ('dimensions') by which we want to describe, group and break down our collections, metrics for quantifying those collections, and properties such as persistent identifiers for tracking collections and managing their digital counterparts. Existing terms from other standards (e.g. Darwin Core, ABCD) are re-used if possible. The data model (Fig. 1) underpinning the standard defines the relationships between those different classes, and ensures that the structure as well as the content are comparable across different datasets. It centres around the core concept of an 'object group', representing a set of physical objects that is defined by one or more dimensions (e.g., taxonomy and geographic origin), and linked to other entities such as the holding institution. To the object group, quantitative data about its contents are attached (e.g. counts of objects or taxa), along with more qualitative information describing the contents of the group as a whole. In this presentation, we will describe the draft standard and data model with examples of early adoption for real-world and example data. We will also discuss the vision of how the new standard may be adopted and its potential impact on collection discoverability across the collections community.

Museums and their collections have specially customized databases in order to optimally gather and record their contents and associated metadata associated with their specimens. To share, exchange, and publish data, an appropriate data standard is essential. ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data) is a standard for biological collection units, including living and preserved specimen, together with field observation data. Its extension, EFG (Extension for Geoscience), enables sharing and publishing data related to paleontological, mineralogical, and petrological objects. The standard is very granular and allows detailed descriptions, including information about the collection event itself, the holding institution, stratigraphy, chemical analysis, and host rock. The standard extension was developed in 2006 and has been used since then by different initiatives and applied for the publication of collection-related data in domain-specific and interdisciplinary portals.

For the last 15 years, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) has recognized two competing standards for organism occurrence data, ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data; Holetschek et al. 2012) and DarwinCore (Wieczorek et al. 2012). These two representations emerged from contrasting strategies for mobilizing information about organism occurrences (also commonly called species occurrence data). ABCD was capable of representing details of more kinds of information, but was necessarily more complicated. DarwinCore, on the other hand, was simpler but more limited in its ability to represent data of different kinds and formats. TDWG endorsed both standards because the different projects and communities that generated them remained dedicated to their different strategies and tool sets, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) developed the ability to integrate data published in either standard. Since their inceptions, DarwinCore and ABCD have become more similar. DarwinCore has gotten more complicated through the addition of terms and has begun to assign terms to classes. ABCD is now expressed in RDF (Resource Description Framework), potentially enabling re-use of terms with alternative structures among classes. At the same time, methodologies for conceptual modeling and representing complex scientific data have continued to evolve. In particular, a suite of modeling and data representation methods related to linked data and the semantic web, i.e., RDF, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), and OWL (web Ontology Language), promise to make it easier for us to reconcile shared concepts among different representations or schemas. A mapping between ABCD 2.1 and DarwinCore has existed since before 2005.*1 ABCD 3.0 and DarwinCore are both now represented in RDF. In addition, the BioCollections Ontology (BCO) covers many of the shared concepts and is derived from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an upper level ontology that has oriented many other biomedical ontologies. Reconciling ABCD and DarwinCore through alignment with BCO (in the OBO Foundry; Smith et al. 2007) would better connect TDWG standards to other domains in biology. We appreciate that many working scientists and data managers perceive ontologies as overly complicated. To mitigate the steep learning curve associated with ontologies, we expect to create simpler application profiles or schemas to guide and serve narrower communities of practice within the wider biodiversity domain. We also plan to integrate the current work of the Taxonomic Names and Concepts Interest Group and thereby eliminate the redundancy between DarwinCore and Taxonomic Concepts Transfer Schema (TCS; Kennedy et al. 2006). At the time of this writing, we have only agreements from the authors (i.e., conveners of relevant TDWG Interest Groups and other key stakeholders) to collaborate in pursuit of these common goals. In this presentation we will give a more detailed description of our objectives and products, the methods we are using to achieve them, and our progress to date.

The TDWG standard ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data task group 2007) was aimed at harmonizing terminologies used for modelling biological collection information and is used as a comprehensive data format for transferring collection and observation data between software components. The project ABCD 3.0 (A community platform for the development and documentation of the ABCD standard for natural history collections) was financed by the German Research Council (DFG). It addressed the transformation of ABCD into a semantic web-compliant ontology by deconstructing the XML-schema into individually addressable RDF (Resource Description Framework) resources published via the TDWG Terms Wiki (https://terms.tdwg.org/wiki/ABCD_2). In a second step, informal properties and concept-relations described by the original ABCD-schema were transformed into a machine-readable ontology and revised (Güntsch et al. 2016). The project was successfully finished in January 2019. The ABCD 3 setup allows for the creation of standard-conforming application schemas. The XML variant of ABCD 3.0 was restructured, simplified and made more consistent in terms of element names and types as compared to version 2.x. The XML elements are connected to their semantic concepts using the W3C SAWSDL (Semantic Annotation for Web Services Description Language and XML Schema) standard. The creation of specialized applications schemas is encouraged, the first use case was the application schema for zoology. It will also be possible to generate application schemas that break the traditional unit-centric structure of ABCD. Further achievements of the project include creating a Wikibase instance as the editing platform, with related tools for maintenance queries, such as checking for inconsistencies in the ontology and automated export into RDF. This allows for fast iterations of new or updated versions, e.g. when additional mappings to other standards are done. The setup is agnostic to the data standard created, it can therefore also be used to create or model other standards. Mappings to other standards like Darwin Core (https://dwc.tdwg.org/) and Audubon Core (https://tdwg.github.io/ac/) are now machine readable as well. All XPaths (XML Paths) of ABCD 3.0 XML have been mapped to all variants of ABCD 2.06 and 2.1, which will ease transition to the new standard. The ABCD 3 Ontology will also be uploaded to the GFBio Terminology Server (Karam et al. 2016), where individual concepts can be easily searched or queried, allowing for better interactive modelling of ABCD concepts. ABCD documentation now adheres to TDWG’s Standards Documentation Standard (SDS, https://www.tdwg.org/standards/sds/) and is located at https://abcd.tdwg.org/. The new site is hosted on Github: https://github.com/tdwg/abcd/tree/gh-pages.

The data schema ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data version 2.06) is a standard for biological collection units, including living and preserved specimen, together with field observation data. Its extension EFG (Extension for Geosciences) is suitable for sharing and publishing data related to paleontological, mineralogical, and petrological objects. In addition to detailed object descriptions and collection events, ABCD EFG provides fine-grained data structures for information on stratigraphy, chemical analyses and host rock composition. The comprehensive EFG was developed in 2006. Since then it has been used by different initiatives, including the publication of collection-related data in domain-specific and interdisciplinary portals such as GBIF, GeoCASe, GFBio and Europeana. The TDWG Paleo Interest Group meeting 2017 will include a focus on the relationship between Darwin Core and ABCD EFG, and following that theme this presentation will give an introduction to the current state of ABCD EFG, its common use cases and an outlook towards the next version ABCD 3.0. We expect that the ABCD EFG terms are suitable for embedding elements into the Darwin Core Paleo Context. Thus, this talk will also initiate the discussion about the most important elements for further use cases from the paleobiological community.