CONVERGING DIGITAL SPECIMENS AND EXTENDED SPECIMENS TOWARDS A GLOBAL SPECIFICATION
The letter of intent at the right can be accessed at; http://bit.ly/LoISpModel. During the BOF01: Converging Digital Specimens and Extended Specimens - Towards a global specification birds-of-a-feather session presented at the TDWG 2020 Virtual Conference on 22 Sept. Alex Hardisty (Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK) and Andrew Bentley (University of Kan-
sas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA) addressed the convergence of the digital and extended specimen (DS
and ES) concepts. Hardisty described DS as the transformative mechanism necessary to link natural science specimens with other artifacts and data about them. Together, DS and ES embody the idea of a curated and authoritative package (or container) of links to data about the physical specimen that is a more efficient and reliable/trusted source of data for scientific work, with potential to save time spent by a scientist finding and collating data about specimens they are interested in. They also ensure the vision of visiting a virtual specimen records and finding all of the ecological, climate, literature, field note, and genomic, and muriad other data that increase its value and enhances its use for science. Hardisty and Bentley's poresentations generated robust disussion and potential of this concept. Following the discussion, Wouter Addink, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, NL, distributed a letter of intent for global collabortion to achieve the DS/ES vision. Both organizations and individuals are eligible to sign the letter. iDigBio has signed and is committed to global collaboration.
