At the end of day two of the GBIF LSID-GUID Task Group I put together this crude diagram to summarise some of the possible links between biodiversity data and the larger linked data cloud, which I, among others, have argued is where biodiversity informatics should be heading. Here's my hastily put together diagram (created using the wonderful OmniGraffle):I've put GBIF at the centre since we're at GBIF, and it's them we are trying to convince.
OK, really must stop avoiding what I'm supposed to be doing (writing a paper, already missed the deadline), but continuing the theme of LSIDs and short URLs, it occurs to me that LSIDs can be seen as a disaster (don't work in webrowsers, nobody else uses them, hard to implement, etc.) or an opportunity.
The latest post on the EOL blog (Biodiversity in a rapidly changing world) really, really annoys me. It claims thatNope, I suggest it demonstrates just how limited EOL is. If I view the page for the red lionfish I get an out of date map from GBIF that shows a very limited distribution, and doesn't show the introductions in Florida and the Bahamas (I have to wade through text to find reference to the Florida introduction, and the page doesn't
D. Ross Robertson has published a paper entitled "Global biogeographical data bases on marine fishes: caveat emptor" (doi:10.1111/j.1472-4642.2008.00519.x - DOI is broken, you can get the article here). The paper concludes:As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, and as demonstrated by Yesson et al.'s paper on legume records in GBIF (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001124) (not cited by Robertson), there are major problems with geographical information
As spotted by dechronization, GBIF has made public that Vince Smith has won the 2008 Ebbe Nielsen Prize.
Resurrecting iSpecies after moving it to a new folder on one of my servers, and browsing popular searches, I keep coming across clearly erroneous distributions. FishBase seems a major culprit. For example, the common pandora Pagellus erythrinus is a marine fish, yet GBIF displays numerous occurrences in mainland Africa (dots with black centre on map below).What gives?
The more I play with GBIF the more I come across some spectacular errors. Here's one small example of what can go wrong, and how easy it would be to fix at least some of the errors in GBIF.
Interesting paper in PLoS ONE (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001124) on the quality of data housed in GBIF. The study looked at 630,871 georeferenced legume records in GBIF, and concluded that 84% of these records are valid.
Here is a live demo of Pygmybrowse using the Catalogue of Life classification of animals provided by GBIF.