Lead programmer, DiSSCo

Description

Naturalis leads the development of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo), a new world-class Research Infrastructure (RI) for natural science collections. DiSSCo brings together 136 museums across 21 European countries to unify and serve genomic, geographical, morphological and taxonomic knowledge for the 1.5 billion physical objects held in European collections. DiSSCo envisages a novel FAIR Digital Object architecture (see fairdo.org) to provide Digital Specimens as digital twins of the physical objects in the future data fabric of interdisciplinary scientific data.

Objective of this position is to further develop and transition the nsidr.org demonstrator into a Digital Specimen pilot to showcase and test the novel principles of a FAIR Digital Object infrastructure to link information about natural history specimens together and enable community curation and annotation. More information about the current implementation and concept can be found here. The DiSSCo technical team has created a wish list for further development of this demonstrator which involves several inter-related developments – in the schema/mechanisms of the repository, in the simpleUI, and in service/app software. These developments will likely need Elasticsearch, SPARQL and NEO4J graph database implementations as well as implementation of APIs and may benefit from machine learning too.