Progress after BiCIKL and beyond: results and inspirations for biodiversity data integration

The symposium Biodiversity Knowledge Linking: Progress after BiCIKL and beyond, presented at the SPNHC-TDWG 2024 Joint Conference, discussed the highlights of the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project. In 2021-2024, BiCIKL saw 14 institutions from 10 countries team up to improve each other's biodiversity infrastructures by working with various data types and creating bi- and multi-directional linkages between each other.

The main output of the Horizon 2020-backed project is the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH). Lyubomir Penev, CEO of Pensoft and project coordinator of BiCIKL, presented the product, which is essentially a one-stop portal for understanding the complex but increasingly interconnected landscape of biodiversity research infrastructures in Europe. In addition, within the BKH, there is the FAIR data place dedicated to increasingly collating research infrastructures and services as long as they comply with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data requirements set out by the BiCIKL consortium. 

Building up on the efforts and results of the BiCIKL project, he also presented the concept of an AI-Assisted “Biodiversity Supergraph”, an initiative aiming to provide integration of biodiversity data on a scale and operational level that has never been attempted before.

Teodor Georgiev, chief technical officer of Pensoft, talked about nanopublications, FAIR scholarly outputs that Pensoft created with Knowledge Pixels as part of the BiCIKL project. Piloted in Biodiversity Data Journal, nanopublications are simple scientific statements stored as structured knowledge on a decentralised server in order to make sure research findings are permanently accessible, reusable, and machine-actionable.

Joana Paupério of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute then demonstrated how molecular data at the European Nucleotide Archive are bi-directionally linked with molecular data at the Global Genome Biodiversity Network, the Catalogue of Life, Plazi, GBIF, the Meise Botanic Garden, and Pensoft’s journals.

Wouter Addink of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden presented digital specimens and discussed the ways they can be cited and referenced, demonstrating what they look like in his latest paper in Biodiversity Data Journal.

Patrick Ruch, head of research at HES-SO, HEG Geneva, Switzerland, then talked about BiotXplorer, an exploration tool to navigate biotic interactions.

Then, the symposium session saw a virtual presentation by Donat Agosti of Plazi on how biodiversity data from traditional publications can be semantically enhanced and in alignment with FAIR data principles.

Jutta Buschbom talked about the non-copyrightability of data in scientific publications. She is the senior author of a joint statement by CETAF, SPNHC and BHL, which proposes a set of recommendations focused on the copyright law aspects and scientific best practice norms for accessing and reusing data from scholarly works.

Genuar Núñez Vega of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ presented a pilot method to measure non-monetary benefit sharing under the Nagoya Protocol by using the Europe PubMed Central text mining to search for Access-and-Benefit Sharing permit codes.

The symposium aptly concluded with Erik Kusch and thoughts on ways of leveraging collaboration and coordination across the European Biodiversity Research Infrastructure Consortium.

Commenting on the event, the BiCIKL team said on X, “The BiCIKL project may have concluded, but our consortium and our outcomes are here to stay and continue to expand and develop!” The project has inspired many institutions to find ways to get biodiversity infrastructures linked, and we are sure to see future initiatives based on BiCIKL’s ideas and partnerships.