Guidelines and Protocols

 

This section of BKH includes information pages presenting various documents on the rationale, policies, functions, guidelines and recommendations of BKH. The General section includes a description of BKH, Information related to Biodiversity Standards and related Policies.

Data standards enable data managers to publish data in structures and formats that can be shared efficiently across the scientific community. Publishing standardized data also creates a key efficiency in data harvesting and aggregation that enables the building of massive biodiversity data portals.

The purpose of the Policies is to build the conditions under which organisations and research infrastructures can participate in the BKH. The contributors of BKH wish to work together towards supporting a new community of users to change the culture in the way biodiversity data are identified, linked, integrated and re-used across the research lifecycle. By doing so, the BKH will help to increase the transparency, trustworthiness and efficiency of the entire research ecosystem. These Policies create a framework for cooperation. Nothing in this document is deemed to constitute an agency or a formal legal entity established by the BKH contributors, nor does it constitute any project or assignment or implies any financial obligation on either BKH contributor towards the other contributors.

The Recommendations are organised at three levels:

• Recommendations for interoperability among infrastructures. This section descrobes the current state of interoperability between infrastructures holding biodiversity data. It examines interoperability from several angles. Some are research subjects that required interoperability to get results, some examine modalities of access and the use and implementation of standards, while others test technologies and workflows to improve linkage of different data types. These topics have supported the formulation of the following recommendations for infrastructures related to (1) the use of data brokers, (2) building communities and trust, (3) cloud computing as a collaborative tool, (4) standards and (5) multiple modalities of access.
• Best practices and recommendations listed below specify how persistent identifiers and annotations should be used in the literature and how they can be minted, cited, and expressed in both human- and machine-interpretable formats to facilitate text and data extraction, conversion to Linked Open Data and further re-use of the article content as FAIR data. 
• Best practices focus on API services, which play a key role in linking data between the infrastructures and creating a network of knowledge, but also describe more generic best practices on e.g. modalities of access, building communities and trust. For most best practices one or more recommendations are given for their implementation.