| The aim of this homepage is to facilitate and disseminate the information exchange within the framework of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union (Structuring the European Research Area Specific Programme, Research Infrastructure Action, Integrating Activity, Integrated Infrastructures Initiative, see here).
This project is carried out by 20 European natural history museums and botanic gardens (see list).
The Networking element of SYNTHESYS aims to raise scientists' awareness of best practice in handling and sampling collections by offering improved training and workshop opportunities, and guidelines for the care, storage and conservation of collections. It will create an integrated European resource; bringing together the biological and geological collections held by major natural history museums and other institutions.
Network Activity D (NA-D) - Developing and Maintaining Databases
NA-D will engage and aid the active participation by all European Countries in the delivery of information systems about their natural history collections. This system will bring the information held by SYNTHESYS partners to all the user sectors that depend on organism related information for their research and/or decision making purposes.
Within the frame of NA-D one of our task is to provide comprehensive data models for the fields of anthropology and earth science collections and the models will be used to provide the structural and semantic definition of extensions to standard schemas (e.g. ABCD). These standards can provide a means to preserve primary research data that is otherwise lost or is hard to retrieve.
The Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem is not only the coordinator of NA-D but they are responsible for input through ABCD and TDWG functions (technical co-operation) while the Hungarian Natural History Museum is playing a leading role in standardization of anthropological collection data within ABCD.
For anthropological collections, bridges can be built to existing standards and ontologies in medicine as well as in historical collections. Building on the experience of biological collections, standards will be modelled and XML schema extensions be made available to the scientific community and public.
By providing intuitive and easy to use interfaces we expect this project to significantly increase user participation in the European collections data infrastructure. We should be able to simplify access to relevant information for a wide range of user communities, streamlining the acquisition of information required for scientific research and environmental decision-making.
Contact persons: Zsuzsa Guba (guba@nhmus.hu), Ádám Kőrösi (korosi@nhmus.hu) and László Peregovits (perego@zoo.zoo.nhmus.hu).
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