Advancement and consolidation of the Specialised Information Service Biodiversity Research (BIOfid)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Alexander Mehler; Daniela Poth; Professor Dr. Klement Tockner
• Subject Area: Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Systematics and Morphology (Zoology)
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 326061700

The specialised information service BIOfid (www.biofid.de) is oriented towards the special needs of scientists researching biodiversity topics at research institutions and in natural history collections. Since 2017, BIOfid has been building an infrastructure that contributes to the provision and mobilisation of research-relevant data in a variety of ways in the context of current developments in biodiversity research. For example, specialist journals were published via an OJS platform and Central European biodiversity literature from the 19th and 20th centuries was digitised, semantically indexed using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and made searchable via the BIOfid portal. The contents of the older literature are of particular importance, as only fragmentary information is available for biodiversity research to date, for example on the occurrence of species before the widespread industrialisation of agriculture and forestry in Central Europe. In the 3rd funding phase, further content from the biodiversity literature is to be mobilised for research and the established services consolidated, optimised and expanded in terms of content and information technology. An interdisciplinary, user-oriented infrastructure will be provided for the users of the BIOfid portfolio. An important pillar of this strategy is the integration of use cases that deal with current issues in biodiversity research, e.g. structural and functional diversity, species interactions and the interactions between species and their environments. On the one hand, these use cases will be used to illustrate the functions of the BIOfid portal for users. On the other hand, these use cases will be used to document a stand-alone NLP pipeline planned for application operation. The semantic text indexing, which is geared towards the biosciences, is to be expanded through finer-resolution knowledge extraction as well as deeper exploration functionality and increased interoperability of the indexed data. This approach plays an increasingly important role for scientific publishing in the open access sector, which is why functional extensions are to be developed for this application segment of BIOfid, implemented in BIOfid-related journals and made available as open source. In addition, the knowledge and technology transfer with FIDs of related disciplines is to be proactively established and the networking with actors of national and international biodiversity infrastructures is to be increasingly focused on. Of particular importance is the integration into the NFDI4BioDiversity consortium, in which BIOfid will contribute to several task areas, namely in the areas of community engagement, national and international networking and long-term data, tools and service preservation, certification.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)