Networking Activities of Environmental Specimen Banks

Abstract

This article gives an overview of on-going processes and strategies of networking in the international community of environmental specimen banks (ESB). These efforts focus on two aspects: harmonisation of scientific methods on the one hand, and data interchange and integration on the other. At an informatics conference like EnviroInfo, data processing is the main topic, but scientific methods provide the basis for data comparability. Even though the ESBs do not fall under any European reporting obligation, we consider them as future part of the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS), where “information is provided once and shared with others for many purposes”. As a solution to overcome any redundancy by-reporting problem, the Linked Data approach is discussed and implementation ways are shown.