New Term - digitalSpecimenID

[wouteraddink]

New DwC term: digitalSpecimenID

• Submitter: Wouter Addink (Naturalis), Sharif Islam (Naturalis), Claus Weiland (Senckenberg), Kessy Abarenkov (UTartu), Maxime Griveau (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle), Sam Leeflang (Naturalis), Anton Güntsch (BGBM), Ana Casino (CETAF), Gil Nelson (iDigBio), Jutta Buschbom (NHM UK, Statistical Genetics DE), Dag Endresen (University of Oslo)

• Efficacy Justification (why is this term necessary?):
  DarwinCore is often used to exchange specimen data but it lacks a term dedicated to digital surrogates of physical specimens. These digital surrogates are known as Digital Specimens and enable the vision of a Digital Extended Specimen Network (see: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac060) in which all specimen related information is connected. International partners united in IPDES (https://des-international.github.io/) are working together since a few years to enable an extensible technical and social infrastructure of data, tools, and working practices to establish Digital Extended Specimens. DiSSCo has been working on a (open source) technical implementation which is planned to go into production this year, the first Digital Specimens have already been created and in the next decade the majority of digitized specimens in the world should have a Digital Specimen on the internet that is extendable to become a Digital Extended Specimen. The first and crucial step towards DES is to give these specimens a digital specimen identifier.

A digital specimen identifier is a persistent identifier that identifies a Digital Specimen, a FAIR digital object on the internet that acts as a surrogate for its physical counterpart. It is NOT a collection catalogue record but a digital object that can contain a collection catalogue record but also a field notebook record, accession record, laboratory information system record, (links to) other records, measurements, models, supplementary media and even software to act as a digital surrogate of a specimen. The digital specimen is a new object on the internet that links to all information that is available on the internet about that specimen including related and derived data such as, but not limited to, DNA sequences, chemical analyses, trait information, agent information, scholarly publications and supporting documentation about history and origin.

The digital specimen identifier has a different purpose from DwC:occurrenceID, DwC:catalogNumber, DwC:materialSampleID or DwC:MaterialEntityID which are used to identify the organism occurrence, physical object or its catalogue record.

The digital specimen identifier serves a few purposes:
It enables the vision of a Digital Extended Specimen Network since this identifier can link the specimen with other specimens and with related and derived information on the internet.
It can be used as a globally unique, resolvable and persistent identifier to refer to a specimen, since a 1:1 relationship between the digital and physical object is kept, where the physical specimen identifier and catalogue number are included in the metadata of the digital specimen identifier record. This solves the problem of persistently referring to a specimen, since physical specimen identifiers are often not globally unique, resolvable and persistent, not machine actionable and cannot be changed to meet these requirements for practical reasons.
It is a versioned identifier that can both be used to refer to the latest, or to a specific version of the digital specimen, allowing the digital specimen to be a mutable, community curated object to make more efficient use of scarce human resources and machine assisted curation solutions.

Inclusion of the digital specimen identifier in DwC is required to refer to a digital specimen, but is also useful to include for uniquely identifying the specimen in cases where a physical specimen identifier cannot fulfill this purpose. The inclusion of this new term in DwC will make it possible to share this identifier with infrastructures and journal systems that support DwC for material citations.

Who guarantees the persistence of these identifiers and who can mint them? The use of DOI-based Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) in this context is DiSSCo's approach to achieving compliance with FAIR principles and the FAIR Digital Object (FDO) framework. Other PID systems may also meet FAIR and FDO requirements. Digital Specimen identifiers are special in that they include metadata in the PID record itself, so even if the registration agency no longer exists, this metadata will still be available. This makes it also worthwhile for institutions to have these DOIs for their specimens even if they cannot provide digital specimens yet. The registration agency for Digital Specimen DOIs is DataCite and in principle every DataCite member can create them, however because of their required FDO capabilities currently only DiSSCo has infrastructure ready to create them.

• Demand Justification (name at least two organizations that independently need this term):
  DiSSCo aims to provide Digital Specimen DOIs as a free service for specimen hosting institutions and will create the first millions by 2024/early 2025. All DiSSCo facilities (over 200 institutions in Europe including e.g. BGBM Berlin, MNHN France, UTartu, Senckenberg, CETAF) will use these identifiers and need this term to share their source data with DiSSCo through DwC. Pensoft needs them for material citations made in their Arpha platform, iDigBio will use this term in pursuit of the Digital Extended Specimen and clarifying DwC. Plazi and the European Journal of Taxonomy need them for material citations generated through their automated workflows and platforms for manual user interaction.

• Stability Justification (what concerns are there that this might affect existing implementations?):
  This is an extra term so it will not affect existing implementations.

• Implications for dwciri: namespace (does this change affect a dwciri term version)?:
  Because this term refers to a persistent identifier itself, there is no dwciri term needed for it.

Proposed attributes of the new term:

• Term name (in lowerCamelCase for properties, UpperCamelCase for classes):
  digitalSpecimenID

• Term label (English, not normative):
  Digital Specimen Identifier

• Organized in Class (e.g., Occurrence, Event, Location, Taxon):
  We think that this belongs in the Record-level class since this is an identifier at the record level, however, we think the same about catalogNumber which is in the Occurrence class, and there is no Specimen class. Since people currently use the Occurrence class to exchange specimen data, it could also be put in the Occurrence class, however that seems wrong since digital Specimens are Information Artefacts and not physical things.

• Definition of the term (normative):
  A persistent, FAIR Digital Object compliant, identifier for a Digital Specimen digital object on the internet.

• Usage comments (recommendations regarding content, etc., not normative):
  Use this term to uniquely and persistently reference a specimen through its Digital Specimen identifier. Do NOT use this term for identifiers that identify the physical specimen, any material entity or its collection catalogue record, such as an ISGN, International Global Sample Number or CETAF stable identifier. Either the latest version of the Digital Specimen can be referenced (default) or a specific version if the digital object is versioned.

• Examples (not normative):
  https://doi.org/10.3535/M42-Z4P-DRD,
  https://doi.org/10.3535/M42-Z4P-DRD?urlappend=/1,
  doi:10.3535/M42-Z4P-DRD

• Refines (identifier of the broader term this term refines; normative):

• Replaces (identifier of the existing term that would be deprecated and replaced by this term; normative):

• ABCD 2.06 (XPATH of the equivalent term in ABCD or EFG; not normative):
  In ABCD 2.06 there is the generic term /DataSets/DataSet/Units/Unit/UnitGUID that could be used, but we propose a new term /DataSets/DataSet/Units/Unit/SpecimenUnit/digitalSpecimenID to make it distinguishable from URIs that identify the physical object or catalogue record.