Sustaining a biodiversity data infrastructure: OpenUp!, BioCASe and GBIF Walter Berendsohn Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem Freie Universität Berlin

The OpenUp! consortium Museum of Natural History

Implementing a sustainable pipeline from natural history collections to the European Virtual Library, Europeana, using BioCASE technology, and contributing to GBIF. Complemented with a system for – Data quality control – Data transformation – Semantic enrichment, including the common names of species in various languages to support data providers and facilitate access to natural history content through the Europeana portal (and GBIF). Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow

OpenUp! Data Quality Toolkit BioCASE Monitor OpenUp! Helpdesk BioCASE Helpdesk Assistance to data providers (275 PM for local data quality enhancements) Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow – serving the collection BioCASE

BioCASE Enhanced data provision to GBIF The OpenUp! information flow – serving global networks

BioCASE Harvester The OpenUp! information flow – harvesting

BioCASE Harvester ABCD ESE EDM Metadata enhancements (e.g. common names, synonyms) The OpenUp! information flow – semantic enrichment

BioCASE Harvester OAI-PMH Harvester ABCD ESE EDM The OpenUp! information flow – to Europeana and other virtual libraries

BioCASE Harvester OAI-PMH Harvester ABCD ESE EDM 1,5 Mio multimedia records mobilised One of the 10 largest content providers in Europeana Major achievement: the OpenUp! information flow – works!

E.g.: referral from the Europeana site to BGBM Search example: Abrus precatorius

Benefits for institutions Increased web traffic to institutional websites – BGBM: for the past 6 months average of 10% referrals from Europeana – RBGK: referrals from the Europeana site represented 28% of all visits to Kew’s Herbarium Catalogue in February 2013; 24% over the six-month period of 1 September 2012 to 28 February 2013 Common standard for information provision to networks like GBIF Common standard for information provision to virtual libraries Data quality enhancements at the source Specialisation of individual institutions – Botanical name service – Zoological name service – Common name service – Helpdesk

The last project year: ensuring sustainability

BioCASE Provider Software: open-source, system-independent (maintenance BGBM Berlin); supporting toolkits (MfN Berlin, BGBM Berlin, RBG Kew, …) Further BioCASE development under SYNTHESYS 3 (DNA-Bank Network) and various national projects Source data mobilisation up and running at NH collections Helpdesk system established at RMCA Tervuren and BGBM Natural History Aggregator database: NHM London; 3 mirrors established (NBGB Meise, NHM Copenhagen, BGBM Berlin) Common names services by NHM Vienna Training and updating documentation: MRAC under EU-BON Sustainability: most problems solved

Costs of sustaining the OpenUp! infrastructure Sustainability not yet ensured for the aggregation process incl. indexing, testing and communications with Europeana Project partner is a company (AIT – Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Graz; engaged in a wide array of Europeana-related EU projects) Costs depend on number of ingests/year, number of data sources, number of new providers (technical support to be covered by BioCASE helpdesk) Cost estimate: Euro 2,000 to 5,000 p.a. The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) has been approached with Service Level Agreement proposal