Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Internet of Samples: Toward an Interdisciplinary Cyberinfrastructure for Material Samples

Kerstin Lehnert, Sarah Ramdeen, Ramona Walls, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Neil Davies, Christopher Meyer, Rebecca Synder, David Vieglais
2019 Zenodo  
Research frequently uses material samples as a basic element for reference, study, and experimentation in many scientific disciplines, especially in the natural and environmental sciences, material sciences, agriculture, physical anthropology, archaeology, and biomedicine. Observations made on samples collected in the field and in the laboratory constitute a critical data resource for research that addresses grand challenges of our planet's future sustainability, from environmental change; to
more » ... od, energy, and water resources; to natural hazards and their mitigation; to public health. The large investments of public funds being made to curate huge volumes of samples acquired over decades or even centuries, and to collect and analyze new samples, demand that these samples be openly accessible, easily discoverable, and documented with sufficient information to make them reusable. The current ecosystem of sample and sample data management in the U.S. and globally is highly fragmented across stakeholders, including museums, federal agencies, academic institutions, and individual researchers, with a multitude of institutional and discipline-specific catalogs, practices for sample identification, and protocols for describing samples. The iSamples project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration that will develop a national digital infrastructure to provide services for globally unique, consistent, and convenient identification of material samples; metadata about them; and linking them to other samples, derived data, and research results published in the literature. iSamples builds on previous initiatives to achieve these goals by providing material samples with globally unique, persistent identifiers that reliably link to landing pages with metadata describing the sample and its provenance, and which allow unambiguously linking samples with data and publications. Leveraging significant national investments, iSamples provides the missing link among (i) physical collections (e.g., natural history museums, herbaria, biobanks [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.4480196 fatcat:4rpglyf7nfa77oxwq5bqkw3bwy