Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Jan 1:2019:baz038.
doi: 10.1093/database/baz038.

The Natural History Museum Data Portal

Ben Scott  1 , Ed Baker  1 , Matt Woodburn  1 , Sarah Vincent  1 , Helen Hardy  1 , Vincent S Smith  1
Affiliations

The Natural History Museum Data Portal

Ben Scott et al. Database (Oxford). .

Abstract

The Natural History Museum, London (NHM), generates and holds some of the largest global data sets relating to the biological and geological diversity of the natural world. A majority of these data were, until 2015, not widely accessible, and, even when published, were typically hard to find, poorly documented and in formats that impede discovery and integration. To better serve the bespoke needs of user communities outside and within the NHM, a dedicated data portal was developed to surface these data sets and provide a sustainable platform to encourage their citation and reuse. This paper describes the technical development of the data portal, from its inception to beta launch in December 2015, its first 2 years of operation, and future plans for the project. It outlines the development principles adopted for this prototypical project, which subsequently informed new digital project management methodologies at the NHM. The process of developing the data portal acted as a driver to implement policies necessary to encourage a culture of data sharing at the NHM.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Data set FileStore and DataStore model.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Overview of the technical architecture for publishing collections data and digital media.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Interactive map visualizing over one million geocoded collection objects.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sketchfab 3D model of southern right whale cranium http://data.nhm.ac.uk/dataset/3d-cetaceanscanning/resource/63a6168b-4594-4998-964e-86b8f7398e9c.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The data portal homepage.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The old web search interface to the Entomology collections of the NHM.
Figure 7
Figure 7
The Luigi ETL pipeline for loading KE EMu collection records into the data portal.
Figure 8
Figure 8
View of NHM specimens on the NHM Data Portal showing DQIs from GBIF (green, no known errors; orange, minor errors; red, major errors).
Figure 9
Figure 9
(A) Treemap of data sets hosted on the NHM Data Portal, size reflects the number of records. (B) Records downloaded from the NHM Data Portal each month. (C) NHM Data Portal Web traffic (page views and sessions). (D) Country of origin for users of the NHM Data Portal since launch.%”.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Page L.M., MacFadden B.J., Fortes J.A. et al. . . (2015) Digitization of biodiversity collections reveals biggest data on biodiversity. BioScience, 65, 841–842. 10.1093/biosci/biv104. - DOI
    1. Blagoderov V., Kitching I.J., Livermore L. et al. (2012) No specimen left behind: industrial scale digitization of natural history collections. Zookeys, 209, 133–146. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Beaman R.S. and Cellinese N. (2012) Mass digitization of scientific collections: new opportunities to transform the use of biological specimens and underwrite biodiversity science. Zookeys, 209, 7–17. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Godfray H.C.J. and Knapp S. (2004) Introduction. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci., 359, 559–569. 10.1098/rstb.2003.1457. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Suarez A.V. and Tsutsui N.D. (2004) The value of museum collections for research and society. BioScience, 54, 6–74. 10.1641/0006-3568(2004)0540066:TVOMCF.2.0.CO;2. - DOI

Publication types