Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

MorphoSource is the only online repository that allows stakeholders from research, education, publishing, collections, and imaging communities to interactively contribute, manage, and access 3D data representing natural history and cultural heritage objects. In the 11 years since MorphoSource launched, it has had a transformative impact on research, education and data management. MorphoSource has been cited for data access or archiving in >2,000 academic articles. Datasets represent specimens from ~1,000 museum organizations, scanned at ~500 different global facilities. Almost 200 of these organizations (representing about 60 institutions) have active management teams. These teams manage more than half of all data existing in MorphoSource, imbuing a unique potential for verifying data quality. In addition, MorphoSource has a sophisticated API that is increasingly relied upon by third party initiatives to query and access data for specific communities and uses. Finally, MorphoSource is leading by example in pushing data standards with a fully published data model and up-to-date, RDF data vocabulary.

Despite its integral role, MorphoSource faces a major challenge of switching from a grant and university-funded operating model to a model that increasingly incorporates community funding in the next 3-5 years. We discuss this model and how it will be implemented.

Co-authors: Julie Winchester