Description
Natural history collections risk remaining isolated archives unless their data and knowledge are transformed into connected, semantically structured, and machine-actionable resources. The LIB Open Knowledge Space is a planned FAIR-, CARE-, and CLEAR-compliant knowledge infrastructure. It is central to the data and knowledge science strategy of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) to integrate collection data, research outputs, and curated knowledge into a unified environment serving as LIB's living memory and an anchor of distributed semantic interoperability.
The architecture rests on two frameworks: (1) The Semantic Units Framework organises biodiversity data and knowledge into modular, identifiable units of meaning, each with a globally unique persistent identifier and explicit epistemic status, supporting assertional, existential, prototypical, and universal statements. (2) The Semantic Ladder defines a progressive formalisation pathway from natural language text snippets through Rosetta Statement anchors to Description Logics-based representations, enabling incremental FAIRness without full formalisation at data entry. Across all levels, vector embeddings support similarity-based search and AI-assisted exploration, enabling hybrid symbolic-vector access that we plan to complement with LIBTellMe, a RAG-based chatbot.
Together, these frameworks support semantic digital twins of specimens capturing not only associated data but also object and object-data journeys, going beyond the extended specimen concept.
We present the conceptual architecture and research programme, and invite discussion on alignment with the goals of the EcoWeaver initiative.
| Topic | Topic 1: : Methods for integrating social and ecological knowledge |
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