Specify for Geological Research Collections
The Specify Collections Consortium (SCC) announces a new initiative to extend the Specify specimen data management platform to the earth sciences. The collaboration is organized by Swiss Natural History Museums in Bern, Basel, Geneva and Lausanne, the SCC, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The effort is funded by a grant from the Swiss Natural History Collections Network (SwissCollNet), a program of the Swiss Academy of Sciences.
We will add support for geological research collections of rocks, minerals, meteorites, gemstones, and related object types, by extending the open-source Specify 7 platform to include the data concepts, collection business logic, and interface capabilities needed for curating geological collection sample data.
Our goal is to support earth science collections with the same software tools and capabilities Specify 7 currently offers for biological collections.
The “GeoSpecify” Project will run from January 2023 through March 2025 and is organized in two phases. Phase 1 will gather: use cases, information models, best practices of geological collection data management, review existing computational approaches and standards. We will do this through interviews with geological curators, collections managers, and researchers. Phase 2 will focus on design and software engineering of the earth science extension. We will publicly release and support GeoSpecify before the end of 2025.
Invitation for Collaboration
The effort will be organized and managed as a community collaboration. We are assembling an advisory “GeoSpecify Advisory Committee” of geoscientists and informaticists interested in participating at any level in the requirements assembly, design specification, and implementation of the platform. We are enthused to involve researchers and staff of geological research collections to identify needed capabilities and to provide feedback on demonstrations and pre-releases of GeoSpecify. If you are an SCC member institution with a geology collection, please make contact.
We also cordially invite researchers and staff from outside of the Consortium to advise and participate in the development process as members of the broader GeoSpecify Advisory Committee (GAC). GAC meetings, site visits, and other collaboration activities will be organized by SCC staff.
If you have an interest in GeoSpecify, please contact Grant Fitzsimmons support@specifysoftware.org.
Institutional Leads
Beda Hofmann and Thomas Burri, NHM Bern thomas.burri@nmbe.ch
Alexis Beck, NHM Geneva, alexis.beck@ville-ge.ch
André R. Puschnig, NHM Basel, andre.puschnig@bs.ch
Gilles Borel, Naturéum, Lausanne, gilles.borel@unil.ch
Jim Beach, SCC, beach@specifysoftware.org
Ben Norton, NCMNS, michaelnorton.ben@gmail.com