DiSSCo Prepare Milestone report MS8.6 - Identifying Indicators for Alignment

Abstract

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is part of an international landscape of bio-, geodiversity, environmental and life sciences related research infrastructures and organisations. This milestone seeks to provide context on DiSSCo’s current positioning within this landscape and to identify opportunities for future alignment and co-operation. The outputs from this report will help to inform future stakeholder engagement plans and prioritisation. A stakeholder analysis workshop identified the key stakeholders within this domain, with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Catalogue of Life (CoL) Geoscience Collections Access Service (GeoCASe), Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and the International Barcode of Life all classified as having high influence and interest in DiSSCo. The stakeholder analysis was supported by insight from the infrastructure contact zones survey, which is an analytic framework used to identify the possible synergies, complementarities and collaboration areas of DiSSCo with other organisations. This provides a systematic and standardised methodology for ranking a wide range of the activities of the different infrastructures relevant to the biodiversity informatics domain. LifeWatch and GBIF both aim to be more generalist infrastructures within the biodiversity informatics landscape, and operate across a large number of activities. There is contact between the activities of these organisations and DiSSCo, and enhanced collaborations may help to maximise the value of projects within this space. DiSSCo will also benefit from the expertise of more specialist infrastructures, such as GeoCASe and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.