OpenUp! - Discovering Natural History as a Part of Europe´s Cultural Heritage Petra Böttinger, Alexa Michel, Walter G. Berendsohn Botanic Garden & Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Germany open-up.eu

Background open-up.eu Multimedia objects from the natural history domain as part of the European Cultural Heritage are still dramatically underrepresented in public awareness

Connecting the cultural and the natural history domains is the central idea behind OpenUp! (“Opening up Europe’s natural history heritage to EUROPEANA”). Tapestry called „Krokus“, B. Rendahl, © Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala, Sweden. Herbarium specimen Crocus vernus L., BGBM Collection, Berlin. open-up.eu

Project Details open-up.eu “OpenUp!” is a 3-year project ( ) co-funded by the European Commission and several European natural history collections. It is an initiative of CETAF, the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities, together with several European GBIF Nodes.

Europeana  A cross-domain portal to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.  To-date 15 million digital images, text and sound files, and videos with a focus on cultural history.  1500 institutions, currently 29 funded projects  Natural history: BHL-Europe, Natural Europe, OpenUp! Bronze Cat Coffin. © The Oriental Museum, University of Durham, Durham, UK.

OpenUp! Task 1: Bringing Content to Europeana open-up.eu OpenUp! Is taking advantage of the established infrastructures in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) OpenUp! is making multimedia content in the BioCASE network accessible to EUROPEANA Committed to serve at least 1.1 million objects by the end of the project (Feb. 2014). All content will automatically be served to GBIF when mobilised by OpenUp.

About GBIF open-up.eu Open access Quality: access to „clean“ data Quantity: over 300 mio indexed records

GBIF Data Portal

About BioCASE open-up.eu

BioCASE Portal

Global Context of OpenUp! open-up.eu

For Europeana, OpenUp! will provide open-up.eu a single access point to distributed non-bibliographic multimedia content in the natural history domain validation mechanisms to ensure compliance with EUROPEANA standards. sustained item-level access by integration with existing networks in the domain (i.e. GBIF, BioCASE and CETAF). metadata enrichment by means of multilingual metadata vocabularies and thesauri for natural history data (e.g. names) to enhance cross-linking of Europeana content. a mechanism to extend participation in content provision

Content made available for EUROPEANA in numbers open-up.eu High quality object images Natural history artwork Animal sound files Movies1 200 Other Total, at least

Bot. Content: e.g. Herbaria, Drawings © J. Holstein et al.

Accesibility open-up.eu Stage 0: Only in real world (paper catalogues, just stacks), only meta information available on the web Stage 1:Stage 2: Online catalogue Digitalization of specimen

herbarium specimen providing (meta) data on… physical object first description/observation geographical location time of collection collecting person annotations barcode …

FILM MIT OPILIACEAE

herbarium specimen search in Europeana

OpenUp! Task 2: technical implementation - provide and support technical standards open-up.eu A drawer with tropical butterflies collected by Alfred Russel Wallace (Natural History Museum, London) Provision of a framework for distributed content from local databases by a constantly updated aggregator meta-database, accessible through the OAI-PMH Interface (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)

Data processing steps in the mobilisation of multimedia content from natural history institutions for Europeana open-up.eu

Enhancing the Metadata open-up.eu OpenUp! implements data quality and enrichment measures to achieve a high level of completeness and correctness of metadata associated with the multimedia objects. A dedicated Data Quality Toolkit integrates a number of quality services, including comprehensive scientific name catalogues for botany and zoology. It also validates information on taxonomy, geography, language, and type of multimedia.

Enhancing the Metadata means open-up.eu ABCD specimen data records contain many elements that are useful for semantic linking Multicultural context Enhance scientific names by multilingual common names Enhance names with synonyms (using same services as data quality toolkit)

Extending the Network open-up.eu OpenUp! is actively promoting participation beyond the initial consortium Concerted Helpdesk activity Outreach and mobilisation activities, supported by participating GBIF Nodes Dissemination activities to reach target groups (scientific community, broader public, …) New providers will be new GBIF/BioCASE providers The type specimen of a goliath beetle Goliathus atlas Nickerl, 1887 deposited in the collections of the National Museum, Prague, and its original type labels

Data Access Rights In OpenUp!, BioCASE and GBIF open-up.eu Red scheelite crystal on quartz gangue, lecoality Příbram – Březové Hory, central Bohemia, Czech Republic. Collection of National museum Prague. „Open access to relevant metadata is the base for semantic linking of scientific content with all other domains“

Data Access Rights In OpenUp! access to metadata is based on CC by license (EU Grant Agreement ) open-up.eu IPR issues related to the project outcome including IPR clearing methods for content and tools (output) All specialised software tools that will be required to operate the access system are or will be available under open source licenses and on public websites: GBIF makes its software available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 ( BioCASE uses a Mozilla Public License. ( The ScratchPad website is based on the Drupal CMS, which operates under the the GNU General Public License. ( If AIT’s contribution to the project is based on own developed proprietary components that are not yet in the open domain, these will be re-factored and delivered under an open source license. The GeoNames server considered as an initial tool for geographic name checking (needed mainly for the locality where the natural history objects comes from, not were it is housed today) operates under a Creative Commons by license for both, data and web services (REST, JSON). ( The textual metadata as well as thumbnail images or soundbits provided for EUROPEANA will be under open access without restrictions (Creative Commons cc by license).

GBIF Data Use Agreement (Website) open-up.eu

Europeana now established CC0 as standard open-up.eu

Institutional options open-up.eu Not to sign Europeana Data Use Agreement (DEA) => No content provision through Europeana => Breach (?) of EU contract for OpenUp! providers Sign DEA and provide data as planned => high quality GBIF-Data is put into the public domain Sign DEA and restrict data provision => slightly more complicated technical setup (loss of future automatic data provision) => semantic links in Europeana may suffer

open-up.eu How to deal with it… ? think science

BioCASE - Biological Collection Access Service – - Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe - – Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities – – - Global Biodiversity Information Facility – – Opening up Europe’s natural history heritage for Europeana – – A Synthesis of Systematics Ressources -

Thank you for your attention! open-up.eu Lateral view of Epimetopus mendeli from Peru, which is currently under description as new for science in a collaborative paper by the scientists of National Museum in Prague and the Museum of Natural History in London.

OpenUp! website

Data processing steps in the mobilisation of multimedia content from natural history institutions for Europeana open-up.eu Local collection databases holding records with references to multimedia objects, managed with local tools that may differ widely between collections, both with respect to content as to relational database management technology.

open-up.eu The local database is accessed by the BioCASE Wrapper, that performs the transformation to ABCD standard XML, thus allowing access by standard tools The Data Quality Toolkit software interacts with the BioCASE Wrapper to conduct integrity checks with respect to names and other data integrity rules. Results are fed back interactively to the local DB management, including an interface explaining XML errors that are discovered in the course of the harvesting process.

open-up.eu BioCASe Provider Software (Wrapper) Software package that „wraps“ around the collection database, equips it with a BioCASe protocol compliant interface 2.Translates queries to the collection database SELECT * FROM specimen WHERE ScientificName LIKE “Marmota marmota%“ 1.Accepts requests from the network 3. Transforms results into ABCD documents and sends them back Marmota marmota?

open-up.eu At the aggregator level the OpenUp! Harvester will access the local wrappers using the OpenUp! Metadata held and cache the ABCD XML files. ABCD files are transformed to EDM conformant data using the Europeana Mapping Content open to Europeana (and others) for harvesting via OAI-PMH

Design Principles No central database  Data remain in the existing DB systems  Data Provider gets full credit  Full control over published data by collection holder Partial publication possible  Collection holder can withhold information from publication (e.g., locality data for endangered species) or exclude records (e.g. until research results are published) Wrapper principle  Data remain in original collection management system  No changes in workflow for curator/local users

ABCD Data Schema Access to Biological Collection Data: Data schema for all types of primary biodiversity data (living/preserved/observational, botanical/zoological/bacterial/viral, marine/terrestrial) XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based  can be consumed by humans and machines Highly complex, hierarchical, currently 1,055 data elements  almost every data item will fit in Extendable (plug-in slot for additional information) standard (currently version 2.06)