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.
One of the most interesting aspects of EOL is "TraitBank", which has been described in a recent paper: TraitBank is available in JSON-LD, and so is potentially part of the Semantic Web.
A decade ago (OMG, that can't be right, an actual decade ago) I created "iSpecies", a simple little tool to mashup a variety of data from GBIF, NCBI, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Google Scholar to create a search engine for species.
This guest post by Tony Rees explores some of the themes from his recent talk 10 years of Global Biodiversity Databases: Are We There Yet?. 10 years of global biodiversity databases: are we there yet?
Two ongoing challenges in biodiversity informatics are getting data into a form that is usable, and linking that data across different projects platforms. A recent and interesting approach to this problem are "data journals" as exemplified by the Biodiversity Data Journal. I've been exploring some data from this journal that has been aggregated by GBIf and EOL, and have come across a few issues.
Following on from the previous post on visualising GBIF data, I've added some more interactivity.
In a recent blog post we discussed caching calls to the web offline, on your own computer. Just like you can cache data on your own computer, a data provider can do the same thing. Most of the data providers we work with do not provide caching. However, at least one does: EOL, or Encyclopedia of Life.
NESCent, EOL, and BHL have put together a research sprint:Since I won't be applying to participate I thought I'd sketch some possible ideas here. Co-occurrence of taxon names as proxy for ecological associations Some time ago I noted that if you build a "tag tree" for taxonomic names in a BHL document you can get some interesting patterns, such as the names of hosts and their parasites occurring together.
BioNames (http://bionames.org) is live. Getting to this point was supported by funding from EOL as part of their Computable Data Challenge. The award from EOL is paying for Ryan Schenk to work on the interface and overall design of the web site, and over the last few weeks we've been working increasingly frantically to get things ready. "Ready" is a relative concept.
Things are finally coming together, at least enough to have a functioning demo. It looks awful, but shows the main things I want BioNames to do. One thing I'm most concerned about at this stage is the possible confusion users might experience between taxon names and concepts.