Collaborative Research: BiSciCol Tracker: Towards a tagging and tracking infrastructure for biodiversity science collections

通常在博物馆藏品中发现的科学标本，是随着时间的推移而增长和变化的不断扩大的信息的基础。这些关于标本和标本所代表的物种的信息往往分散在各个机构和独立的计算机系统中，使其难以获取或合成。该项目的目标是开发一个双向系统，连接和跟踪科学标本和生物标本相关数据，并使该系统广泛适用于科学界和公众。该系统将采用全球唯一标识符（guid）来标记和更新与标本相关的信息，从而允许最终用户和标本收集者之间进行交流。该项目将提高非科学家和科学家的数据质量和数量，并将通过培训研讨会、暑期学生实习和社区生物闪电式改进等方式积极参与用户社区。整合标本数据和相关信息的能力将使与系统学、生物地理学和物种分布变化相关的关键研究成为可能。这些反过来又对气候变化、不断变化的土地利用以及其他理解过去、将变化置于历史背景中以及预测物种和环境未来的关键问题产生影响。该项目是一项为期10年的努力的一部分，该努力旨在将美国研究收藏的生物标本相关的科学信息数字化和动员起来。该项目的图像和数字化数据将整合到在线国家资源中，如社区战略计划所述，可在http://digbiocol.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/digistratplanfinaldraft.pdf上获得。

Scientific specimens, typically found in museum collections, serve as the anchor for an expanding array of information that grows and changes over time. This information, about specimens and the species that the specimens represent, is often scattered geographically across institutions and across independent computer systems, making it difficult to access or synthesize. The goal of this project is to develop a two-way system of linking and tracking scientific specimens and specimen-related data across biological collections, and to make this system widely available to the scientific community and the public. This system would employ globally unique identifiers, or GUIDs, to tag and update information associated with specimens, allowing communication between end users and collections. This project will improve data quality and quantity for non-scientists and scientists, and will actively engage use communities through training workshops, summer student internships, and community BioBlitz enhancements.The ability to integrate specimen data and associated information across biological collections will enable critical studies related to systematics, biogeography, and changing species distributions. These in turn have implications for climate change, changing land use, and other questions key to understanding the past, placing changes in an historical context, and predicting the future of species and environments. This project is part of a 10-year effort to digitize and mobilize the scientific information associated with biological specimens held in U.S. research collections. The images and digitized data from this project will be integrated into the online national resource as outlined in the community strategic plan available at http://digbiocol.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/digistratplanfinaldraft.pdf.