About the Platform

Designed to facilitate the use of BKH 

Welcome to the BKH Learning Platform designed to support the users of the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH in short) in navigating the various tools and services created to facilitate its use. To that end, training materials, in the format of Learning Courses, have been specially designed to guide and instruct on the best use of those products. These courses are available online for self-paced use or can be adapted for onsite or virtual workshops.

The BKH is a “one-stop portal for understanding the complex but increasingly interconnected landscape of biodiversity research infrastructures in Europe. The BKH acts as a knowledge broker for users who wish to navigate and access the sources of open and FAIR biodiversity data, guidelines, tools, and services”. It aims to be an open repository of tools and services for FAIR data that are interlinked through a varied and increasing number of services created by the scientific community to support excellent science. By now the BKH allocates 13 services that will grow in number and scope as the need for a multidisciplinary and integrative approach increases in all biodiversity-related domains.

The tools and services designed and developed by different Research Infrastructures that operate with biodiversity-linked data are novel and thus, require an additional effort to make them accessible and useful for all types of users. For that, a series of courses have been designed and hosted on the e-Learning Platform where possible new courses can be added in the future.

Before we get into a further explanation of the Platform and the courses featured on it, let us first take a bit of a closer look at what the BKH aims to achieve, what this platform is all about, and how you can benefit from it as a user of this new repository of interlinked resources. 

Guiding the access to interlinked biodiversity data 

This web-based learning Platform hosts training materials that illustrate how to make use of the different services created for accessing and using biodiversity data interlinked through the published literature and between the data classes. The training materials are the result of a collaborative effort among the partners of the BiCIKL project (an EU-funded project under which the BKH has been developed), based on the assessment of user needs conducted during the project. 

Given that the BKH was created to support a newly emerging community of users of interlinked corpora of data, services, and knowledge across the entire biodiversity research cycle, there is a clear need for training on the basics of using the BKH as well as more in-depth instructions on using its linked services.

In its current version, the BKH Learning Platform contains two Learning Courses, each consisting of multiple modules:

1. the Introduction to BKH Course, focusing on understanding the functionalities offered by the BKH (introductory module) and its linked data services (each service with its dedicated module),

2. The Data Liberation and Publishing Tools Course, a more advanced training Course serving as an example of an in-depth version of one of the multiple services featured on the BKH

Since potential users of the BKH come from various backgrounds and levels of expertise (more on that in a bit…), the Learning Platform is designed in a way that allows its users either to start from the very beginning or use it in a more targeted manner, focusing on specific modules.

Now it’s time to briefly explain the BKH itself…