Mission & promise

An open, collaborative museum of the living and mineral world.

Clio is being built so citizens and academics can work side by side, with every carefully verified observation designed to become citable, standards-compliant science.

The promise to contributors

Your work keeps its context and its credit.

Your observation keeps your name.

Every contributor is meant to hold a contributor-owned decentralized identifier (DID), generated and kept in their own browser rather than issued or held by Clio — not an optional add-on, and not yet linked to an account in production — so the observation or identification you make can carry your name in a durable, verifiable way. ORCID linking alongside your DID is also planned.

Visible and free to view.

The intended public collection is never paywalled. We will make the access and licensing conditions clear at contribution time.

Never silently deleted.

Records are intended to remain available with a reason on file for any moderation or removal decision.

A full opinion trail.

Verbatim submissions and past identifications are designed to remain alongside the current interpretation, rather than being overwritten.

You choose the licence.

The planned upload flow will offer the GBIF-acceptable set: CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-NC. A licence choice should not change silently.

The promise to science

Evidence should remain inspectable.

Native vocabulary

The planned schema uses existing Darwin Core, REMBI, OME, ABCD-EFG, Audiovisual Core, EML, and related terms as its foundation.

Three visible tiers

Unverified, community-verified, and expert-verified are intended to be queryable record data with an audit trail.

Tamper-evident direction

Clio Local Evidence v1, a vector-conformant Ma’atara SHA3-384 Merkle construction, and a personal Veritas chain per contributor with a separate Clio receipt all exist as tested, undeployed local foundations, signed with ML-DSA-65 only. A contributor can already generate the key one of these would require, locally in their own browser at /contribute; nothing past that step is deployed yet. Independent external anchoring remains a gated plan; no Clio record is currently claimed to be immutable.

Citable snapshots

Darwin Core Archive exports and DataCite DOI registration are planned capabilities, not current Clio services.

How we communicate

Mission, progress, and external relationships are kept distinct.

Clio is pre-launch. We do not claim GBIF or ALA harvesting, EBI mirroring, DOI minting, Veritas anchoring, identity-provider integration, institutional partnership, or academic endorsement until each one exists and can be demonstrated.