Arctos is a community and museum collection management solution providing research-grade open data for 29 museums holding 158 collections. Arctos is based on a deeply relational, highly-normalized data model developed as fundamental research infrastructure for curators, collection managers, investigators, educators, and anyone interested in natural and cultural history. This structure creates data that are inherently more discoverable due to their predictability. Standardized, predictable data shared between institutions may be used to form resolvable, reciprocal links to related internal and external data objects, such as hosts to parasites, specimens to GenBank sequences, cited specimens to journal articles, and specimens shared between Arctos institutions. Reciprocal linkages allow for powerful cross-resource questions, such as “What parasites of Canis are documented in Arctos?” or “Show all specimen records in family Canidae that are hosts of parasites in family Taeniidae.” Arctos was the first collection management solution to develop reciprocal linkages between specimens and GenBank sequence data, thereby establishing the current standard for specimen-specific unique identifiers. Additionally, Arctos leverages external web services to extend capabilities. Taxonomic tables may be curated individually or shared with other collections and classifications can be created manually or through import from various resources accessed via GlobalNames. Collections can opt to use the integrated WoRMS taxonomy which includes all aphiaID’s and is continually updated. Integrated GeoLocate provides semi-automated georeferencing in Arctos and also allows transformation of coordinates into standardized descriptive searchable text via reverse georeferencing services. Specimens and media in Arctos have an inline “thumbnail map” dynamically generated via Google Enterprise tools. CrossRef and PubMed web services provide semi-automated publication creation in Arctos. Stable URLs or IDs allow linking from Arctos specimen records to MorphoSource, Barcode of Life, BugGuide.net, GBIF, iDigBio, InvertEBase and iNaturalist. In this presentation, we will share the benefits and challenges of linking data as well as suggestions for connecting data via stable URLs and identifiers.
