How Belnet is helping to enhance the value of natural history collections from Central Africa

by
Davina Luyten

Communications Officer @ Belnet

Did you know that the AfricaMuseum, the Institute of Natural Sciences and Meise Botanic Garden are the custodians of the richest natural history collections pertaining to Central Africa? As a subcontractor participating in the Canathist project, Belnet will play a crucial role in making these collections available to researchers worldwide.

A full inventory 

The Canathist project is being funded by the Federal Science Policy under the INFRA-FED research programme. This programme encourages the development of research infrastructures within federal scientific institutions. 

The goal of Canathist is to create the most complete inventory of natural history collections from Central Africa held in Belgian institutions. This includes conducting studies into the origins of these collections and fast-tracking their digitalisation. Ultimately, all of the data collected will be shared with the competent authorities in the countries of origin. As such, Canathist is making a direct contribution towards the federal government's digital strategy to implement open data and open science policies.

In addition, the project is focusing on providing researchers with a set of open source tools. These include collection management systems and servers on which to store two and three-dimensional digital copies of items from the collection. These tools will make it possible to contribute towards international infrastructures, such as those under development within the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). 

As such, Canathist is making a direct contribution towards the federal government's digital strategy to implement open data and open science policies.

Did you know?

In total, the AfricaMuseum (RMCA), the Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) and Meise Botanic Garden (MBG) hold as many as 10 million items originating from Africa in their collections, in addition to specimens of over 100,000 species. 

These collections play a crucial role in research into biodiversity, climate change and invasive species.

The role of Belnet 

2D image created with the Orthanc system

Belnet is playing a specific role within the project by taking responsibility for the hosting of Orthanc on its own infrastructure. Orthanc is an open-source platform originally designed for medical imaging. The project partners plan to use the Orthanc system to manage and publish two and three-dimensional multimedia files of the items in their collections that have been digitalised. 

Fully implementing Orthanc as a Belnet service will provide significant benefits: 

  • High availability: Belnet will set up the service with full redundancy, so that it is able to provide a high level of availability to researchers. 
  • Enhanced security: the Belnet infrastructure fulfils high requirements in terms of cybersecurity. 

In addition, each organisation can count on a specific storage capacity to meet its needs. 

R&E community 

As the Canathist project will cease to run at the end of 2026, Belnet is already thinking about the future of this service. The next few months will therefore be spent exploring whether there is a broader interest within the R&E community in utilising the Orthanc system as a service. 

Amongst other things, Orthanc offers the best speed and performance on the market when it comes to visualising 3D objects in web browsers. Belnet could leverage its robust infrastructure in order to offer Orthanc as a service to universities, universities of applied sciences and research institutions working with digital imaging, amongst others. 

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