Thank you so much for having me.
I don't have that much shape.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Sulean.
I am a software developer at the Naturalis biodiversity center in Lydon in the Netherlands.
I'm really excited to talk to you about a project that we've been working on called Disco, which is the distributed system of scientific collections.
Yeah, so let's get started.
Here is what I'm going to talk about today.
First, I'm going to talk a little bit about what a natural history collection is or natural science collection is and why they are important.
And the obstacles that we might face with digitizing them.
Then we talk, I'm going to start talking about disco, my project and the kinds of problems that we can address to help this process and make data more accessible.
Then I'm going to talk about enriching the data first by humans through annotations and then by machines.
Lastly, I'm just going to give a little bit of what's next for disco.
So what is a natural history collection?
If you've ever been to a natural history museum or maybe a botemical garden, sometimes a zoo or an aquarium, these kinds of institutions often.
The public facing part is only the tip of the iceberg and these institutions host these really rich and valuable collections of plants and animals and fungi and geological collections.
And it's this really rich historical record going back hundreds of years when they were collected.
Up until the present, a specimen will have important information like what is it, so the taxonomy, where was it found, so locality data, who collected it and when it was collected, so you get that historical record.
Researchers, in biodiversity, will rely on these kinds of collections to identify organisms or specimens that they found.
And so these kinds of collections, they allow them to determine what it is or if it's something entirely new.
And so these natural history collections, they become this really rich reservoir, really important resource for researchers, not only helping us understand the past, but also inform policy decisions about really important issues like climate change and biodiversity loss.
And just sort of dipping our toes beginning to talk about why it's important that these are digitized.
I've got two example articles here, one is about a research project where they looked at digitized moss from across institutions.
And the use that data to confirm a hundred-year-old, sorry, a hundred-year-old hypothesis about moss coloration.
Yeah, and the second article is from the Museum for Natu Kunder in Berlin, excuse my German.
And they looked into their collection and they found 40 specimens, sorry, 40 species previously unknown to science.
These were just lying around in a box somewhere.
And so it's really important that not only are they accessible to researchers to study, but we also need to know what is there.
And so let's talk about digitizing.
Unfortunately, huge parts of the natural science collections across Europe and the world are not digitized.
This means that researchers often will have to go to the physical institutions, potentially several institutions, and that cost time, that cost money, that cost carbon, which is something that we want to be aware of in the biodiversity sector.
And if things are digitized, that means often, these institutions have been doing things differently for hundreds of years.
So there's some data disparities, data quirks that each institution has.
So that means data wrangling and harmonization, which is a waste of researchers' time.
These digitized Asian experts, when they do happen, it's very difficult to scale up and look out this out of European scale.
Expertise for one is limited, so like I said, one of the most important things in assessment is what is it, what is the taxonomy.
But we are facing right now a taxonomy shortage that we don't have the experts to go around to identify all of what we have, and things are going unidentified, even if we are digitizing them.
The second thing, of course, it's expensive.
These large-deciation projects, they are possible for the larger institutions, but smaller collections is a much bigger barrier.
And finally, collaboration can be really difficult.
Often, like I said, you have these data differences between institutions.
That means any tools that you make that are designed to help this visualization process, they're siloed to one institution.
And so yeah, we don't get to collaborate as much.
So here is where I finally get to the thing that I am working on.
Just go, it stands for the distributed system of scientific collections, and we are a European funded in development research infrastructure.
So what I'm going to do is to increase access to European natural science collections across Europe, make them fair, make them and support digitization at scale.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about where disco fits into this biodiversity data landscape.
So I have my data providers, and that is CMS, which I realized is not a well known acronym, but it stands for collection management system.
And the digital systems that different institutions would store their data in.
And then on the right there, we have data consumers.
So we have organizations that aggregate specimen data as well as other kinds of biodiversity data.
And so what we envision is just go sitting in the middle, to talk enriching the data before they get to the data consumers.
So what do we do? First, we harmonize data all incoming data to OpenDS, which is our in-house data specification based on existing data models.
There's a couple of different big data models that you would see in the biodiversity sector.
And we say no, we're going to do one. And of course, we can talk about that XKCD article or that XKCD comic.
But we do our best.
We assign every individual specimen, a digital object identifier.
That means that it is a unique identifier for a specimen that is resolvable.
It'll always resolve back to disco.
And it'll always resolve back to disco.
And that means that they can be cited individually as part of a research article about an expedition or something like that.
We capture provenance. So what has changed in the source system data or beyond?
We link data and extend it. So we link it to other institutions or sorry, other infrastructures.
Because the specimen is interesting, but it's even more interesting if you can link it to the genomic sequences.
Or the environmental data that it was found in.
And so by linking all of these, you get this like extended digital object that is really rich.
And finally, annotations, which are made by humans or machines, which is the main thing I'm excited to talk to you about.
And so this is the core disco platform and on top of it, you can build services that are machine facing.
You can also build services that are human facing.
That's sort of where the distributed comes from.
We develop this core data infrastructure and then our partners are developing different services on top.
So annotations. We use, it's based on the W3C model.
And essentially, it's own digital object attached to or associated with the digital specimen or immediate object.
You can add information, delete information, assess, comment.
You say all of that, it becomes, your opinion becomes a separate digital object and then it will be ready for review.
You can annotate the entire specimen or specific part like the taxonomy.
If you have an media object, you can annotate a region of interest, such as indicating that this is the antenna.
Yeah, and so the process, this is how we envision the process to be going.
So anything that is an adding, a deleting or an editing annotation, even though that information is stored in its own digital object,
eventually we wanted to modify the target.
So we don't want an annotation saying, hey, this field needs to be changed to this.
We want to actually transform the object.
So a user would select a specimen and annotate it.
The annotation is discussed and approved by the collection manager or an expert.
Then the specimen becomes updated with new information and that new information is published.
Both back to the source system, the institution, and also to the data aggregators on the other side.
Now, this looks great.
The red box is in progress. This is our main goal for 2026.
So in disco, we can capture the annotations from experts right now.
So we have been partnering with researchers at Nutralis and this is a really good example that really helped us streamline.
Our annotation process for users.
So the Naturalis Papiota project was a digitization project at our institution of 300,000 butterflies stored in papiots,
which are the triangular envelopes that you saw.
So we had papiots in papiots.
It was powered by volunteers.
So these people, they extracted these very delicate, often centuries old butterflies with tweezers.
They photographed them with the scale.
They transcribes the date, the location, the collection ID.
But there's some and any other information that was with the butterfly.
But there's an important piece missing.
It's the taxonomy.
Now, if we had an army of taxonomists during our digitization,
we would be a very lucky institution.
But instead, unfortunately, we were our collection managers.
We're sending spreadsheets back and forth by email,
say, with a please fill out this taxonomy for this specimen,
which obviously is so prone to human area.
You want to make sure that you're using the identifying the right specimen
and what if you do a typo,
and then people would take those spreadsheets and then manually insert them
back into our collection management system.
So this process has much to be improved.
So working with our target users, we identified a couple of ways
that disco can help.
The first was reducing human error with taxonomy.
So it would be really helpful if we could automatically fill out taxonomy
instead of relying on people not only getting the specimen name right,
but also the family, the genes, the order, the class,
all of the higher levels of taxonomy.
We also want to capture transparency.
So in the future when this annotation is accepted,
we still want to know who made the annotation and who accepted it,
why is this specimen like this now?
And we want an ambiguous process.
So we want to really be sure of what specimen you're actually identifying
so the annotation is attached to the specimen.
Okay, so here I have, I should have a video,
but I thought, you know, it's foster, let's do a live demo.
Let's live a little bit.
So here we are.
Hang on, I'm going to go back.
Of course, this is where I try this while like 10 minutes ago,
but of course, it's the Wi-Fi.
And again.
We're living too much.
Okay.
Well, we're going to go back to, okay.
I'm sorry, too.
Yeah.
I think it might be a Wi-Fi issue.
Change your Wi-Fi.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is the homepage of our sandbox environment,
for Discover, which is the human interface for disco.
So I can choose from a couple of different domains.
I'm just going to click search and this will show us,
if you want to go back to the website.
Okay.
Okay, so this is the homepage of our sandbox environment for Discover,
which is the human interface for disco.
So I can choose from a couple of different domains.
I'll show us a couple of top specimens.
And so what I'm interested in, if I'm a text on a missed,
and a collection manager has asked me,
hey, can you please identify these butterflies from this data set?
I can go into source system,
and I click on natural as biodeversity center,
lepidoptera, the butterflies.
That is the name of the data set we want to identify.
And maybe because we're only interested in the,
oh well.
We're only interested in specimens that are missing a text on me.
So let's go no genus.
And let's click has media because the pictures are pretty.
Okay.
So this is the main specimen landing page.
You can have a basic specimen information here.
Sometimes if there are coordinates in the data,
you have a geographical map that is rendered.
It has information about the specimen host.
This is all data that we've transformed from the source system.
So we don't generally add anything new.
You see, I am logged in here.
I need to be logged in with an architect ID to make an annotation.
And then I click annotate on,
except it identification.
This is the taxonomy block.
So we're interested in adding some more information.
Now unfortunately, I am not a butterfly expert.
And I'm trying to think of like a butterfly scientific name.
The only thing I know is like bombis,
which is a bumblebee.
So don't accept this annotation.
But let's say I am a expert.
And I'm starting this as a bumblebee.
And so what you can see here.
Oh, this is actually, this is an avis.
This is a bird actually.
I'm not very good at my job.
I'm a bad taxonomist.
So, but what you've seen there is that it's automatically filled up
the genus and the family.
And then also the class and the phylum as well.
So it's filled up all of the higher levels of taxonomy.
All I've had to do is fill out the scientific name.
I click review on the annotation.
And I can see all of the different things that have changed.
So these are the differences between what the existing data is
and what I am saying it is.
And I submit the annotation.
And then I have something that is much pending.
And eventually, a collection manager should come and see this.
And say, that's crazy.
That's not a bird, reject.
So that is my demo.
Okay.
So it's great that we are doing.
It's great that we're doing annotations with humans.
What if we could get machines to do the work as well?
We call these services that make annotations, machine annotations, services,
or mass.
So if I start saying mass in this presentation, you know what I mean now.
So it's great to use machines to do the work because they got to do the boring stuff.
We save our precious, precious taxonomous to do the complicated edge cases.
Like I said, disco has one single data model.
That means a service adapted for disco can be applied to any institution that we partner with.
It lets us reuse work.
So researchers are constantly developing their own tools instead.
They can select from a wide, hopefully wide platform of services.
And we have a modular design.
So disco was designed with the idea that other services should plug into the platform.
So that means that anyone can adapt an existing service to disco.
Which I can show you very briefly here.
What is in blue here in the box is the core disco architecture.
So when a user schedules a mass, a machine annotations service,
that spins up what we call a wrapper service.
And all this does is it takes the job and then it extracts important information.
And it sends it to a value service.
And this could be anything.
This could be a complicated and sophisticated AI model that identifies species or reads labels
or it could be something as a spell checker.
That spelling is important.
But so it receives that request.
It spins out a result.
And then this wrapper service takes those results and formats it as a disco annotation.
So we designed this system.
But we had only ever developed masses ourselves.
So we partnered with Senkabur to see,
hey, is this documentation good enough?
Can you do this as well?
And so in December 2024,
they were able to integrate a service that they developed an AI model
that captured pixel-level mass masks on herbarium sheets.
And we integrated that with disco in our acceptance environment.
And then we were feeling really confident.
And we had a hackathon in 2025 with three days,
three teams, and three machine annotations services
were able to be integrated in disco at the time.
What we were really testing was the integration process.
So how was the documentation, what bounced to people hit?
These masses are hackathon quality.
But we were really happy with the results that people were able to so quickly
integrated into our system.
Finally, the most recent hackathon we had was an April 2025.
This was a project based on the juubov capacity building project of AI
for specimen labels, which uses AI to read specimen labels.
And now, if we can get this into our pipeline,
it really helps, it can really help this digitization process
because all you need is a photo and an AI model reading the labels
and creating these annotations.
And then it's up to a human to correct any mistakes that it might make
and accept or decline those annotations.
I did record this one because the API is a little slow.
But here I have a media object that I'm looking at.
There's a label that we want to read.
And so I go to the top button there.
That's a pity.
It's very little cut off, but I am selecting the machine annotations
service I am interested in running.
It's called Splat, the specimen automated label transcription.
And then I run it.
And then this wrapper service gets spun up in the disco architecture.
And then that wrapper service calls the Splat API.
And then the Splat API returns a result.
And the wrapper service gives us an annotation.
So if I go back to the specimen and I click on annotate here,
I can see that it has created several annotations
about what is read from the label.
And what this one results me very.
But it was a really good proof of concepts.
And we want to partner further with other such services.
So lastly, I just want to talk about what is next for disco.
We want to work on accepting annotations.
That's a huge part of what we are.
It's a huge part of our value offering.
We want to be able to export the annotations and publish them.
We want to continue our collaboration with researchers.
And we want to become a Eric, which is a European research infrastructure.
Something, essentially means that we are a legal entity.
And then we can make SLAs with other mass providers.
I want to thank the people on the slide, the development team, the collaborators.
Anyone at Naturalis that I've ever gotten a coffee with, my colleagues for coming here at 930 in the morning.
And if you are interested in what we do, we would give,
we have example masses and documentation.
One formation, the QR code just goes to the slide.
So you can click on the links.
Thank you so much for your attention.
Yeah, that's it.
Thank you for your work.
You can take them as you just repeat this.
Yes.
This is really cool.
I'm taking a PhD at all.
Thank you for your work.
I ask a question that's like most general, which is annotations are often wrong.
Even when people do the answer work.
Or do you really like the way of saying that presentation could be improved?
That's okay.
So the question, thank you, was are we developing a service that people can reply to annotations essentially and say,
Oh, this could be improved?
In some regards, yes, you can.
So any object in our service can be annotated.
So you can annotate an annotation as well.
It's also annotations aren't.
Who can accept an annotation is still something that everybody wants to know we're working on a trust model who has control over the data,
who owns the data.
But that is something that we're keeping in mind.
Also for machine annotations services.
Oh, this machine made a slight mistake.
Let's correct it instead of doing it ourselves.
Hi.
This is a question from the labs.
So the text moment architecture changes, right?
New papers come out.
They redefine the file out to me at the same thing.
Does that change get echoed in your argument?
I'm so glad you asked that question.
The question was, textonomy is always changing.
How do we capture these changes in the architecture?
So we use catalog of life as a backbone for that.
That for those that don't know, it is a service that captures textonomy.
And we harmonize everyone to the catalog of life's textonomy.
So other institutions might have slight differences in opinions,
but we like to have one standard.
And so as catalog of life releases,
there are new releases.
We want to stay up to date with that.
I'm saying there's a textonomy, sure,
but the last two people have been taxonomous.
Where have you been?
When you show the demo,
there was something in the filter.
Does this meant better for like meat, meat,
a level of anything?
Oh, what is that?
So what in my demo,
I showed something called Mids level in the filters.
What is Mids?
Mids is a in development standard?
Yeah, it's still in development.
It stands for minimum information about a digital specimen.
Mids.
And essentially that describes the completeness of a specimen.
So if it has an institution ID and a catalog number,
we're mid zero.
That's the minimum that we'll accept.
If it has a little bit more information about locality,
a little more rich data, it can get to level one.
And then if it's really complete,
it'll get to level two.
And so the standard describes,
it's essentially a completeness indicator for a specimen.
So through the annotations,
you can bang the level of the meat to one from one one.
So the question was,
can annotations increase Mids?
Yeah, if you're annotating the targeted fields.
Yeah, no, that's the idea behind this go is getting more enriched data.
So increasing the completeness of the data.
Yeah, so you mentioned the fact that you're getting data out of institutions,
you just think collections,
and that you plan to get those data or annotation back to the original system.
So my question is large.
You can take whatever detail on that,
like how institutions,
organizations are considering your work on the disk of platform.
If there are tension in there,
between the original system and yours.
So the question is,
is there tension between the source data system,
so these institutions and what we're doing to the data?
I would say no,
we're trying to offer them a service and not
replace them necessarily.
The idea is that we don't want 300 different institutions to make changes.
We want to do the changes for them once.
I wouldn't say tension,
but the question that we still do need to answer is,
who can accept annotations and who can,
yeah, who can make these changes.
And this is something that we're working with the community to discover,
to define a solution that really makes the most sense for the biodiversity research.
Community.
Yes?
Do we do anything to Wikipedia,
or would we do this a big,
like, person or...
The question is, are we doing any work with Wikimedia
or Wikidata to disambiguate persons?
Yes.
So there are projects that are happening,
I mean, all over,
but specifically at our institution as well.
And we would like to use their work and just sort of steal it,
adapt it to disco,
and then make it accessible to everyone.
Because it is really important,
they're not just the main collector gets credit,
but also all of the people who worked with them.
Very cool question.
You mentioned,
Hackathon?
Yes.
Is it something which usual?
Is it close though?
Is it open?
Hackathons?
The question was,
Hackathons?
And are the regular,
are they close or are they open?
I would say they are open.
They are not regular.
We are, oh, this is recorded.
But we are hoping to have one this year,
but nothing has been set in stone.
But, yeah, they are, yeah.
Thank you.