Abstract

Type specimens are physical representations of the concepts taxonomists use to study the diversity of life forms. Massive digitization efforts in natural history collections keep producing digital representations of many of these specimens. In contrast, digital technologies like DNA barcoding, genome sequencing or 3D imaging routinely produce digital representations of specimens, highlighting properties that cannot easily be assessed using a physical specimen. While those digital representations of specimens - termed cybertypes - can and do yield insights into taxonomic and related research, their mapping to existing taxonomic concepts is difficult, and their integration with the more traditionally digitized natural history collections has not even begun. In this talk, I am outlining some of the challenges and opportunities along this road.

The talk was on short notice turned into a poster, which was presented offline on the basis of a poster of the Coding da Vinci hackathon.