Digital Natural History Collection of the Netherlands 

The project Digital Natural History Collection of the Nederlands (DNCN) has been set up by Naturalis with technical support of Trezorix and is funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

With respect to the content, several Dutch institutions which own natural history collections are involved in the realization of the project, including:

• Naturalis
• Natural History Museum Maastricht
• Natural History Museum Rotterdam
• Twentse Welle Museum Enschede
• Natural History Museum Brabant
• Natural History Museum Nijmegen
• Museon

The goal of the DNCN project is to make the various digital natural history collections searchable via the web in a coherent and integrated way. These collections contain different kinds of objects, such as:

• taxonomic data
• records from collection management systems
• articles
• images
• sounds

The nomenclature of species plays an important part in the findability of the collection objects. To this end the naming system of the Dutch Species Register, which is well suited for these kinds of tasks, will be called in.

The infrastructure for the project will be set up according to the RNA architecture. The core is made up of a findability layer containing the metadata in SKOS and RDF format and giving access to the various data resources. The RNA Toolset is being used to create and maintain this findability layer and to produce textual and structured content.
 
In addition the Toolset is being used for creating and maintaining collection data by partners who do not yet have a specialized registration system at their disposal.