iSamples (Internet of Samples): Cyberinfrastructure for material sample discovery, sharing, and reuse

The Internet of Samples (iSamples) is a multidisciplinary project implementing transdisciplinary infrastructure services to identify material samples, record metadata about them, and link with other samples, derived data, and published research results in a machine-actionable, AI-ready manner.iSamples consists of two key components: iSamples-Core, a core data model and accompanying taxonomies providing a common, extensible mechanism for describing physical samples; and iSamples-in-a-Box (iSB), a containerized, standalone system that enables creation of identifiers and associated metadata, metadata management, sample identifier resolution, and discovery of samples.iSB is typically deployed in proximity with an existing collection to provide a common iSamples-Core view of physical specimen records and expose consistent service interfaces to facilitate open human and programmatic access. iSB may be deployed in a hierarchy, with aggregator instances accumulating content, and further presenting that content to other instances. All instances provide common functionality and may be configured to support domain extensions to the iSamples-Core model. In this manner, the iSamples infrastructure provides a consistent, general view across all material sample records, while also enabling domain specific views.