iSamples (Internet of Samples): Cyberinfrastructure to support transdisciplinary use of material samples

Poster presented at the 2021 EarthCube Annual Meeting Abstract: Research in many Earth Science domains depends on material samples collected in the field, generated in experiments, or retrieved from space. There are often great costs associated with the capture of samples, which might be rare, unique, or irreplaceable. In 2014, EarthCube funded iSAmplEs: The Internet of Samples in the Earth Sciences. This project “promoted best practices and standards for sample identification, documentation, citation, curation, and sharing ... as a foundation to building a shared cyber-infrastructure”. Based on the outcomes, a multidisciplinary research collaboration emerged to address these issues across the broader Natural Sciences including biology and anthropology. The resulting “Internet of Samples (iSamples)” is funded to develop a national cyberinfrastructure for samples. This cyberinfrastructure will provide services to uniquely, consistently, and conveniently identify material samples, record metadata, and link them to other samples, derived data, and research results published in the scientific literature. It aims to serve all research involving material samples from natural and built environments. iSamples has two components: iSamples-in-a-Box (iSB), a standalone system that enables creation of identifiers and their associated metadata, metadata management, sample identifier resolution, and discovery of samples; and iSamples Central (iSC), a permanent Internet service that preserves and indexes sample metadata to ensure reliable discovery and retrieval, and that provides a gateway between iSB instances and identifier authorities to ensure that remote iSB content is fully synchronized with the relevant authorities (e.g., IGSNs generated on iSB are synchronized with iSC and the IGSN central authority). By providing these services that augment existing identifier authority capabilities, iSC enables support of other identifier types beyond IGSN (e.g., ARKs, DOIs). iSamples will coordinate with the newly funded Sampling Nature RCN, which aims to build a community of collaborative researchers to exploit the potential of an accessible, integrated corpus of material sample data