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.

Google knows how many species there are. More significantly, it knows what I mean when I type in "how many species are there". Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do this with biodiversity databases? For example, how many species of insect are found in Fiji? How would you answer this question? I guess you'd Google it, looking for a paper.

I've put together a working demo of some code I've been working on to discover GBIF records that correspond to museum specimen codes. The live demo is at http://bionames.org/~rpage/material-examined/ and code is on GitHub. To use the demo, simply paste in a specimen code (e.g., "MCZ 24351") and click Find and it will do it's best to parse the code, then go off to GBIF and see what it can find.

More for my own benefit than anything else I've decided to list some of the things I plan to work on this year. If nothing else, it may make sobering reading this time next year. A knowledge graph for biodiversity Google's introduction of the "knowledge graph" gives us a happy phrase to use when talking about linking stuff together. It doesn't come with all the baggage of the "semantic web", or the ambiguity of "knowledge base".

Google's Knowledge Graph can enhance search results by display some structured information about a hit in your list of results. It's available in the US (i.e., you need to use www.google.com, although I have seen it occasionally appear for google.co.uk.Here is what Google displays for Eidolon helvum (the straw-coloured fruit bat). You get a snippet of text from Wikipedia, and also a map from the BBC Nature Wildlife site.