A focused workshop sponsored by iDigBio will be conducted to discuss, define, and distill the standards and cyberinfrastructure requirements for the scientific collections and biodiversity sciences. An operational assumption is that the biodiversity informatics community has already made significant effort and headway in certain tools, practices, and standards, and what’s now crucial is to identify critical gaps in the infrastructure and training that can be a further focus of community activities.

This workshop will bring together experts in biodiversity informatics and related fields (e.g., library and information sciences). Workshop participation has been determined by invitation only in order to maximize the best possible cross-section of experience while maintaining a smaller group size that is condusive to open discussion. It will not be possible in a 2.5 day workshop to cover every technology need, but several priorities have been identified through the recent ADBC PI Summit and other venues. Areas of priority include, but are not limited to 1) harmonizing data and metadata requirements for digital collections 2) examining semantic and linked-data approaches to biodiversity data interoperability, and 3) developing training and testing resources for georeferencing, and 4) defining storage capabilities, interoperability, and computational requirements for the national resource. Stakeholders include NSF funded initiatives (e.g., TCNs, VertNet, BiSciCol, Filtered Push, Specify, and iDigBio), standards organizations such as TDWG, GSC, Dublin Core, collections data managers, and library and information scientists.