Day three of TDWG 2017 highlighted some of the key obstacles facing biodiversity informatics. After a fun series of "wild ideas" (nobody will easily forget David Bloom's "Kill your Darwin Core darlings") we had a wonderful keynote by Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) entitled "Everything happens somewhere, multiple times". Javier is CEO and founder of Carto, which provides tools for amazing geographic visualisations.

I gave a "wild ideas" talk at TDWG17 suggesting that the biodiversity community use Bitcoin to make micropayments to use data.

Some random notes on the first day of TDWG 2017. First off, great organisation with the first usable conference calendar app that I've seen (https://tdwg2017.sched.com). I gave the day's keynote address in the morning (slides below). Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph from Roderic Page It was something of a stream of consciousness brain dump, and tried to cover a lot of (maybe too much) stuff.

I'm going to the TDWG Identifier Workshop this weekend, so I thought I'd jot down a few notes. The biodiversity informatics community has been at this for a while, and we still haven't got identifiers sorted out. From my perspective as both a data aggregator (e.g., BioNames) and a data provider (e.g., BioStor) there are four things I think we need to tackle in order to make significant progress.

In Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Nine Billion Names of God Tibetan monks hire two programmers to help them generate all the the possible names of God. The monks believe that the purpose of the Universe is to generate those names, once that goal is achieved the Universe will end.

Quick final comment on the TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?. As I noted in the previous post, Olivier Rovellotti (@orovellotti) and Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) have produced some nice visualisations of the frog data set: Nice as these are, I can't help feeling that they actually help make my point about the current state of RDF in biodiversity informatics.

Sadly I won't be at TDWG 2009, at least not in person. However, there is a session on wikis, which may contain this brief screencast of my iTaxon experiments. The screencast was made in haste, but tries to convey some of the ideas behind these experiments, especially the idea that by linking data together we can generate more interesting and rich views of objects such as scientific publications.

Lately I've been returning to playing with RDF and triple stores. This is a serious case of déjà vu, as two blogs I've now abandoned will testify (bioGUID and SemAnt). Basically, a combination of frustration with the tools, data cleaning, and the lack of identifiers got in the way of making much progress.

Time for more half-baked ideas. There's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about EOL, Linked Data (sometimes abbreviated LOD), and Wikipedia. Pete DeVries (@pjd) is keen on LOD, and has been asking why TDWG isn't playing in this space. I've been muttering dark thoughts about EOL, and singing the praises of Wikipedia. On so it goes on. So, here's one vision of where we could (?should) be going with this.

The LSID discussion rumbles on (see my earlier post). One issue that has re-emerged is the use of HTTP proxies in RDF documents.