Biocultural labels
Some communities now write their own terms onto data about the living things they know. The terms travel with the data.
Biocultural Labels are small digital tags that Indigenous communities attach to genetic resources and the data made from them. A label says where the data came from, whether consent was given, and how the community expects it to be used.
What they are
The labels come from Local Contexts, a global initiative that helps Indigenous communities manage their cultural heritage and data. Jane Anderson and Maui Hudson developed the Biocultural Labels in 2019. They extend an earlier set, the Traditional Knowledge Labels, to genetic resources and genomic data.
Each label is an icon with a short text, attached to a database record, a collection or a dataset. They come in three groups:
Provenance. Who the material comes from: one community, several communities, or a clan.
Protocol. Whether consent was verified or not.
Permission. How the community expects it to be used: for research, open to collaboration, open to commercial use, non-commercial only, or for outreach.
Who applies them
Only communities apply Labels. Researchers and institutions have a separate tool, Biocultural Notices. A Notice flags that Indigenous rights or interests may apply to data someone holds. A Label is the community’s own statement about it.
Communities make their Labels in the Local Contexts Hub, and other platforms can show them through the Hub’s connection for software. Dataverse, a widely used research data repository, can display them on dataset pages. There is also an experimental way to write a Hub reference into sequence files before they go into GenBank, the public DNA database.
Why they matter now
In 2019 the Global Indigenous Data Alliance set out the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. They sit alongside the better-known FAIR principles, which are about making data easy to find and reuse. FAIR asks whether data can be reused. CARE asks who decides, and who benefits. Labels are one practical way to put CARE into a database.
They also connect to the argument over digital sequence information. The Cali Fund works at the level of whole industries, through a shared pot of money. Labels work one record at a time. The initiative was built to carry Indigenous provenance into research data, sequence data included.
You won’t find Labels on most database entries yet. That doesn’t mean nobody has a stake in them.
What you can do as a designer
Part of being an AI-native biodesigner is asking who and what a change touches. A Label answers part of that question in the community’s own words. A few habits help:
Look for Labels and Notices. Check the record, the collection and the paper behind the data you use.
Read the permission. Research only? Non-commercial? Let it shape what you make and how you show it.
Treat “consent not verified” as a reason to ask first.
Leave the Labels to communities. If your own work involves Indigenous lands, waters or knowledge, ask whether your university has a Local Contexts account for Notices.
Labels describe a community’s expectations. They sit alongside the law and data licences, and respecting them is a choice about care. This page isn’t legal advice.
Local Contexts. Biocultural Labels. localcontexts.org
Anderson, J. and Hudson, M. (2020). The Biocultural Labels Initiative: supporting Indigenous rights in data derived from genetic resources. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 4, e59230. doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59230
Carroll, S. R. et al. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19(1), 43. doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
The Dataverse Project. Local Contexts integration. guides.dataverse.org
