Claus Weiland leads the development team for the collection management system and geobiodiversity databases at the Frankfurt/M site of Senckenberg - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research. His team is highly focused on combing both subsymbolic (ML, DL) and symbolic (ontologies, "rules", knowledge graphs) AI with the FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) concept to open up and mobilize collection, specimen and species observation data for integrated data spaces such as EOSC.
He is PI in several global, European and national research infrastructure projects such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo RI, dissco.eu), the NFDI Consortium Earth System Sciences (NFDI4Earth, www.nfdi4earth.de), the FAIR Data Infrastructure for Agrosystems (FAIRagro, fairagro.net) and the FAIR Digital Objects Forum (FDOF, fairdo.org).
In this context, the team established infrastructures like Biodiversity Digital Twin's (biodt.eu) mapping service (mapping.bio) and the AI4WildLIVE portal (wildlive.senckenberg.de) in the framework of German Federal Ministry of Education and Research's initiative for artificial intelligence in biodiversity research (BiodivKI).