What is BKH?

The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH) is a web platform acting as an integration point of access to open and FAIR biodiversity data, tools and services provided by its contributing organisations. BKH does not constitute a legal entity nor does it provide its own services. Its main aim is to support a new emerging community of users of interlinked corpora of data, services and knowledge across the entire biodiversity research cycle, from collecting specimens to final publications and conversion of these into a biodiversity knowledge graph. 

The services accessible through BKH are elaborated by the BiCIKL project. The project opens the next-generation approach to harvesting, liberating, accessing and re-using data from the biodiversity literature and linking these to specimen and sample collections, genomic sequences, taxon names and operational taxonomic units, for anybody, anytime and anywhere.

The BKH platform operates on several levels as an information cluster (internal communication and network activities, publishing platform for community-related documents, including standards, guidelines, policy briefs and a catalogue of data and linked data services) to ensure effective integration, prioritisation, and sustainability of the new community of users. The engagement flows between providers of data and users of the derived services. 

BKH consists of the following modules:

  • Home page: Presents the main user groups and the benefits BKH provides to them.
  • Guidelines and Protocols: Information pages presenting various documents on the rationale, policies, functions, guidelines and recommendations of BKH.
  • FAIR Data Place (FDP): This module is the core of BKH and presents FAIR data, services and tools developed in the course of the BiCIKL project. In the future, the FDP will also accept services on linked data provided by new contributors and third parties. The FDP consists of three sub-modules:
    • Infrastructures and organisations: Lists the contributing organisations and research infrastructures with short descriptions and links to their data, tools and services. Research infrastructures are sorted by the main type of biodiversity data they aggregate and serve: specimens, sequences, taxon names and literature.
    • Linked data services: A catalogue of novel services that deliver FAIR data linked between biodiversity research infrastructures.
    • Become a contributor application form: A formal questionnaire which serves as a basis to check the suitability of an organisation or research infrastructure to join BKH.
  • Relevant projects: Describes research projects that use linked FAIR biodiversity data. The page also displays a network analysis tool based on FAIRsharing.org data.

Disclaimer: The partner organisations and research infrastructures are fully responsible for the provision and maintenance of services they present through BKH. All enquiries about a particular service should be sent directly to its provider.