University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![Singlefig 98253
jpg](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U2AGskKg_dU/V8WfP75AcOI/AAAAAAAAERM/nfQ33C_wduM/singlefig_98253.jpg.png?imgmax=1600 "singlefig_98253.jpg.png"){border="0"
width="235" height="128" style="float:right;"} David Schindel and
colleagues recently published a paper in the *Biodiversity Data
Journal*:

> Schindel, D., Miller, S., Trizna, M., Graham, E., & Crane, A. (2016,
> August 26). The Global Registry of Biodiversity Repositories: A Call
> for Community Curation. BDJ. Pensoft Publishers.
> <http://doi.org/10.3897/bdj.4.e10293>

The paper is a call for the community to help grow a database
([GRBio](http://grbio.org)) on biodiversity repositories, a database
that will \"will require community input and curation\".

Reading this, I\'m struck by the lack of a clear sense of what that
community might be. In particular: who is this database for, and who is
most likely to build it? I suspect that these are two different sets of
people.

### Who is it for?

It strikes me that the primary target for GrBio is people who care about
cleaning up and linking data. This is very small set of people. While
cleaned data is nice, and cleaned and linked data is great, by itself
it\'s not much use until it finds its way into useful tools. Why would
taxonomists, curators, and other people working with biodiversity data
care about GrBio? What can it give them? Ultimately, we\'d like things
such as the ability to find any specimen in the world online using
simply it\'s museum collection code. We\'d like to track usage of that
code in other databases, such as GenBank and BOLD, and in the primary
literature. These are all nice things, but they won\'t happen simply
because we have a curated list of natural history collections.

### Who will curate it?

Arguably there are only two active communities who care about the
contents of GrBio on a scale to actually contribute. One is GBIF, which
is building its own registry of collections as more and more natural
history collections move their collections online. GBIF\'s registry is
primarily for digital access points to collection data, which don\'t
necessarily readily map to physical collections listed by GrBio. If GrBo
is to be relevant, it needs to have mappings between its data and GBIF.

But the community that I suspect will really care about this, to the
point that they\'d actively engage in editing the data, is not the
biodiversity community. Rather, it\'s people who edit Wikipedia and
Wikidata.

I was at one of the GrBio workshops and gave a short presentation, which
included this slide:

::: {style="margin-bottom:5px"}
**[GrBio Workshop
talk](//www.slideshare.net/rdmpage/grbio-workshop-talk "GrBio Workshop talk"){target="_blank"}**
de **[Roderic Page](//www.slideshare.net/rdmpage){target="_blank"}**
:::

If you search for a major museum on Google, on the right you will often
see a rich \"knowledge panel\" giving much of the information that GrBio
wants to capture (museum name, location, etc.), often with a link to the
Wikipedia page for that institution (see <http://g.co/kg/m/01t372> for a
detailed view of the knowledge panel for the NHM). GrBio can\'t compete
with Wikipedia for richness of content (just think of all the Wikipedia
pages in languages other than English). Google\'s database is mostly
hidden, but we can get some of the same data from Wikidata, e.g. the
Natural History Museum is [entity
Q309388](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q309388) on Wikidata.

From my perspective, the smart move to make is not to appeal to an
overstretched community of biodiversity researchers, many of whom are
suffering from \"project fatigue\" as yet more acronyms compete for
their attention. Instead, position the project as adding to the already
existing database of natural history institutions that is growing in
Wikidata. GrBio could either link to Wikidata and Wikipedia pages for
institutions, or simply move it\'s data editing efforts to Wikidata and
have GrBio be (at most) a search interface to that data. The notion of
having a separate database for the world\'s collections might not be the
best way to achieve GrBio\'s goals. A lot of people involved in both
Wikipedia and Wikidata care about cultural institutions (of which
natural history museums and herbaria are examples), those are the people
GrBio should be engaging with.


David Schindel and colleagues recently published a paper in the
<em>
 Biodiversity Data Journal
</em>
:  The paper is a call for the community to help grow a database (GRBio) on biodiversity repositories, a database that will "will require community input and curation".  Reading this, I'm struck by the lack of a clear sense of what that community might be. In particular: who is this database for, and who is most likely to build it? I suspect that

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

GRBio: A Call for Community Curation - what community?