Five major types of biological data have been defined in GFBio and are recognised by the Data Centers in NFDI4Biodiversity. They are used for the "Service Description" of the individual Data Centers as well as in the context of the Technical Documentations of processing tools.


Types of biological data:


Type 1: Biodiversity and Occurrence data

These are the data from the classical collection and alpha-diversity research domain, i.e. digital objects with taxon name(s), georeferences, e.g. locality, date and often referenced resources as multimedia objects. We distinguish between:

  • Type 1a: Collection Data (with reference to physical object)
  • Type 1b: Observation Data (without reference to physical object)

Used standards:

  • ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data) and extensions
  • DwC (Darwin Core) and extensions
  • DC (Dublin Core) as included in ABCD and DwC for basic bibliographic information

Used identifiers:

  • primary identifier: biological (digital) object (digital specimen or observation)
  • main secondary information: geo-information and time, related (multimedia) resources

Example packages:

Notes

The time investment for individual scientific data curation to be done by data providers and GFBio data managers before and during data transformation is varying.

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Type 2: Taxon Data

These are taxon-related data (e.g. in a catalogue, checklist or so-called red list).

Used standards:

  • ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data) and extensions
  • DwC (Darwin Core) and extensions
  • DC (Dublin Core) as included in ABCD and DwC for basic bibliographic information

Used identifiers:

Example packages:

Notes

The time investment for individual scientific data curation to be done by data providers and GFBio data managers before and during data transformation is varying.

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Type 3: Environmental Biological and Ecological Data

These are environmental biological and ecological study data including functional and phylogenetic trait data and other kind of analysis data.

Used standards:

  • EML (Ecological Metadata Language)
  • DELTA (Description Language for Taxonomy, for trait data)
  • SDD (Structured Descriptive Data, for trait data)
  • GML (Geography Markup Language) and ISO 19139 metadata

Used identifiers:

    1. primary identifier: biological class concept (e.g., OTU or OFU)
    2. main secondary information: trait and environmental (analysis, measurement, transformation, translocation) information
    1. primary identifier: environmental and ecological study item and event
    2. main secondary information: biological and ecological information, measurements and description of the environment

Example packages:

Notes

The time investment for individual scientific data curation before and during data transformation of (matrix) data into a highly structured and standard schema-compliant format at data item level might be high. Thus, the data management process has to be agreed between data provider and GFBio data curator before starting (see DMPs).

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Type 4: Non-Molecular Analysis Data

These are non-molecular analysis data (data sets and/or data packages) in its original data file format (often RAW format).

Used standards

  • EML (Ecological Metadata Language) for basic bibliographic information
  • DC (with Pansimple XSD) for basic bibliographic information

Used identifiers:

  • primary identifier: as provided by data producer
  • main secondary information: as provided by data producer

Example packages:

  • coming soon

Notes

This type of data is accepted, as far as well documented and with a core set of standard-compliant metadata and appropriate for long-term archiving.

The time investment for individual scientific data curation to be done by data providers and GFBio data managers before and during data transformation might be limited.

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Type 5: Molecular Sequence Data

These are molecular sequence data including MIxS-compliant metadata.

Used standards:

  • MixS (Minimum Information about any (X) Sequence)

Used identifiers:

  • primary identifier: molecular sample accession
  • main secondary information: geo-information and time

Example package:

Notes

The time investment for individual scientific data curation to be done by data providers and GFBio data managers before and during data transformation might be limited.

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Additional Information

For more details see also

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