The LIB Open Knowledge Space will be the Centre's flagship infrastructure. It is designed to be:
FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, so that data and knowledge can be discovered and reused by humans and machines alike.
CARE: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics, so that biodiversity data and knowledge are governed responsibly and equitably, recognizing the rights and interests of the communities and countries of origin connected to our collections, including those with a colonial collection history.
CLEAR: Cognitively interoperable, semantically Linked, contextually Explorable, intuitively Accessible, and human-Readable and -interpretable, so that knowledge remains meaningful and navigable even as complexity grows.
AI-ready: Built on curated ontology-grounded knowledge graphs that provide AI systems with reliable ground truth, supporting explainability and reducing hallucinations.
Living: The Semantic Ladder framework allows content to enter the knowledge space at any level of semantic formality, from natural-language text snippets to fully formalised ontology-grounded knowledge, and to be progressively enriched over time.
At its heart, the LIB Open Knowledge Space embeds data in knowledge rather than storing it in isolated relational databases. Every specimen, observation, and research result becomes a node in a semantically structured, provenance-aware knowledge web, what we call a Semantic Digital Twin: a formal, machine-interpretable representation of a collection object and its full scientific history, including its object journey (e.g., loans, rehousing, alcohol changes) and its object-data journey (e.g., number of data visits, citations, downloads).
By connecting every specimen, observation, and result into a single, traceable, and continuously growing web of knowledge, the LIB Open Knowledge Space becomes LIB’s living memory, preserving not only what the collections contain, but everything we come to know about them.