Dear subscriber, welcome to the second edition of the newsletter and also a warm welcome to all new subscribers. It has been an interesting week. In this edition I will talk about some work updates, a one-day workshop I’ve attended last week and I have a video recommendation.

I've written a short paper entitled "Liberating links between datasets using lightweight data publishing: an example using plant names and the taxonomic literature" (phew) and put a preprint on bioRxiv (https://doi.org/10.1101/343996) while I figure out where to publish it. Here's the abstract: In some ways the paper is simply a record of me trying to figure out how to publish a project that I've been working on for several years, namely

David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the new views of life afforded by technological advances in cameras, drones, diving gear, and submersibles. One might hope that the supporting information online reflected the equivalent technological advances made in describing and sharing information. Sadly, this is not the case.

Some random notes on the first day of TDWG 2017. First off, great organisation with the first usable conference calendar app that I've seen (https://tdwg2017.sched.com). I gave the day's keynote address in the morning (slides below). Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph from Roderic Page It was something of a stream of consciousness brain dump, and tried to cover a lot of (maybe too much) stuff.

In a recent Twitter conversation including David Shorthous and myself (and other poor souls who got dragged in) we discussed how to demonstrate that adopting JSON-LD as a simple linked-data friendly format might help bootstrap the long awaited "biodiversity knowledge graph" (see below for some suggestions for keeping JSON-LD simple). David suggests partnering with "Three small, early adopting projects". I disagree.

In this post I’ll go through an illustrated example of what I plan to do with my text mining project: linking-up biological specimens from the Natural History Museum, London (sometimes known as BMNH or NHMUK) to the published research literature with persistent identifiers. I’ve run some simple grep searches of the PMC open access subset already, and PLOS ONE make up a significant portion of the ‘hits’, unsurprisingly.

OK, a bit of hyperbole in the morning. One of the goals of RDF is to create the Semantic Web, an interwoven network of data seamlessly linked by shared identifiers and shared vocabularies. Everyone uses the same identifiers for the same things, and when they describe these things they use the same terms. Simples.Of course, the reality is somewhat different.

One of the potentially powerful features of TreeBASE II is availability of a RDF version of a study. This means that, in principle, one could take the RDF for a TreeBASE study, combine it with RDF from other sources, and generate a richer view of a particular study.

Continuing the Friday folly theme, below is a screencast of a linked data browser that uses the same ideas as last week's screencast, but uses a custom browser I've written to display the results in a more user-friendly way. Linking the data together from Roderic Page on Vimeo.The demo is live, you can view it at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/browser/www/uri/http://bioguid.info/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001787.

Time for a Friday folly. I've made a clunky screencast showing an example of linking biodiversity data together, using bioGUID as the universal wrapper around various data sources.