DISSCO - Distributed System of Scientific Collections

DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) is building a digital infrastructure to unify all of Europe’s natural science collections into a single European digital collection.
DiSSCo will digitise physical collection specimens at scale and digitally connect them, linking their associated data, thus making Europe’s natural history collections more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable for research and society.

The video introduces DiSSCo and its vision of a Europe where scientific research is no longer enclosed within the physical boundaries of institutions, enabling better responses to global challenges.
European natural history collections hold an immense record of life and Earth’s history, but their information is traditionally scattered across institutions, countries and different data systems. DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) works to digitally unify all of Europe’s natural history collections into a single, connected Research Infrastructure with unified protocols and processes. A single European natural history collection.
At the heart of DiSSCo technical infrastructure is the Digital Specimen: a digital representation of a physical specimen that encapsulates all data related to it, including taxonomic, geographic, genomic, molecular, imaging, literature and other research data from different sources across Europe. All the information of a digital specimen follows the FAIR principles-making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable-thus enabling researchers, collection managers and other users to discover, connect, enrich and analyse collection data at an unprecedented scale.

Learn more on www.dissco.eu/