University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

![Google](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dH8sDYt9g2g/VfKvk8wcnbI/AAAAAAAAECU/mnAvY-rnK6M/google.png?imgmax=800 "google.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="460" height="282"} 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. Or you\'d look in vain on GBIF, and then end up
hacking some API queries to process data and come up with an estimate.
Why can\'t we just ask?

On the face of it, natural language queries are hard, but there\'s been
a lot of work down in this area. Furthermore, there\'s a nice connection
with the idea of knowledge graphs. One approach to natural language
parsing is to convert a natural language query to a path in a knowledge
graph (or, if you\'re Facebook, the social graph). Facebook has some
nice posts describing how their graph search works (e.g., [Under the
Hood: Building out the infrastructure for Graph
Search](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-building-out-the-infrastructure-for-graph-search/10151347573598920)),
and there\'s a paper describing some of the infrastructure (e.g.,
\"Unicorn: a system for searching the social graph\"
[doi:10.14778/2536222.2536239](http://dx.doi.org/10.14778/2536222.2536239),
get the [PDF
here](http://db.disi.unitn.eu/pages/VLDBProgram/pdf/industry/p871-curtiss.pdf)).

Natural language queries can seem potentially unbounded, in the sense
that the user could type in anything. But there are ways to constrain
this, and ways to anticipate what the user is after. For example, Google
suggests what you may be after, which gives us clues as to the sort of
questions we\'d need answers for. It would be a fun exercise to use
Google suggest to discover what questions people are asking about
biodiversity, then determine what would it take to be able to answer
them.

![Suggest](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Vp4SPs4OUtQ/VfKvmJuKMXI/AAAAAAAAECc/2VhtR_7Vols/suggest.png?imgmax=800 "suggest.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="460" height="119"} All very sensible questions that
existing biodiversity databases would struggle to answer.

There\'s a nice presentation by Kenny Bastani where he tackles the
problem of bounding the set of possible questions by first generating
the questions for which he answers, then caching those so that the user
can select from them (using, for example, a type-ahead interface).

::: {style="text-align:center"}
::: {style="margin-bottom:5px"}
**[Natural language search using
Neo4j](//www.slideshare.net/KennyBastani/natural-language-search-using-neo4j "Natural language search using Neo4j"){target="_blank"}**
from **[Kenny
Bastani](//www.slideshare.net/KennyBastani){target="_blank"}**
:::
:::

Hence, we could generate species counts for all major and/or charismatic
taxa for each country, habitat type (or other meaningful category), then
generate the corresponding query (e.g., \"how many species of
[birds]{style="background-color:yellow"} are there in
[Fiji]{style="background-color:cyan"}\", where the
[yellow]{style="background-color:yellow"} and
[cyan]{style="background-color:cyan"}\" terms are the things we replace
for each query).

One reason this topic appeals is that it is intimiately linked to the
idea of a [biodiversity knowledge
graph](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-i-be-working-on-in-2014-knowledge.html),
in that answers to a number of questions in biodiversity can be framed
as paths in that graph. Do, if we build the graph we should also be
asking about ways to query it. In particular, how do we answer the most
basic questions of the information we are aggregating in myriad
databases.


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.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Possible project: natural language queries, or answering "how many species are there?"