Making Historical Biodiversity Data Available to Researchers

The project aims to enable researchers to access historical biodiversity data. Such data is present in various types of historical sources, commonly collected during expeditions to biodiverse areas. Although there are millions of such resources stored in museum archives worldwide, these are currently inaccessible to researchers and include handwritten organism descriptions, physical specimens and detailed organism illustrations. To this end, Stork has developed a workflow that allows biodiversity researchers to semantically annotate and access the data present in these diverse types of observational data. Together with the eScience Center, Stork will take the next crucial step to create a scalable and sustainable integrated web environment based on this workflow, which will allow researchers to disclose the contents of their archives.

This project is the winner of the Young eScientist Award 2019.