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width="90" height="70" style="float:right;"}BMC Ecology has published
Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts\' white paper on biodiversity
informatics:  
  

> Hardisty, A., & Roberts, D. (2013). A decadal view of biodiversity
> informatics: challenges and priorities. BMC Ecology, 13(1), 16.
> [doi:10.1186/1472-6785-13-16](http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6785-13-16)

  
Here are their 12 recommendations (with some comments of my own):  
  

1.  **Open Data, should be normal** practice and should embody the
    principles of being accessible, assessable, intelligible and
    usable.  
      
    *Seems obvious, but data providers are often reluctant to open
    \"their\" data up for reuse.*
2.  **Data encoding should allow analysis across multiple scales**, e.g.
    from nanometers to planet-wide and from fractions of a second to
    millions of years, and such encoding schemes need to be developed.
    Individual data sets will have application over a small fraction of
    these scales, but the encoding schema needs to facilitate the
    integration of various data sets in a single analytical structure.  
      
    *No I don\'t know what this means either, but I\'m guessing that
    it\'s relevant if we want to attempt this:
    [doi:10.1038/493295a](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/493295a)*
3.  **Infrastructure projects should devote significant resources to
    market the service they develop**, specifically to attract users
    from outside the project-funded community, and ideally in
    significant numbers. To make such an investment effective, projects
    should release their service early and update often, in response to
    user feedback.  
      
    *Put simply, make something that is both useful and easy to use.
    Simples.*
4.  **Build a complete list of currently used taxon names** with a
    statement of their interrelationships (e.g. this is a spelling
    variation; this is a synonym; etc.). This is a much simpler
    challenge than building a list of valid names, and an essential
    pre-requisite.  
      
    *One of the simplest tasks, first tackled successfully by
    [uBio](http://www.ubio.org), now moribund. The [Global Names
    project](http://globalnames.org/) seems stalled, intent on drowning
    in acronym soup (GNA,GNI,GNUB, GNITE).*
5.  **Attach a Persistent Identifier (PID) to every resource** so that
    they can be linked to one another. Part of the PID should be a
    common syntactic structure, such as 'DOI: \...' so that any instance
    can be simply found in a free-text search.  
      
    *DOIs have won the identifier wars, and everything citable
    (publications, figures, datasets) is acquiring one. The mistake to
    avoid is forgetting that identifiers need services built on top of
    them (see <http://labs.crossref.org/> for some DOI-related tools).
    The core service we need is reverse lookup: given this thing
    (publication, specimen, etc.) what is its identifier?*
6.  **Implement a system of author identifiers** so that the individual
    contributing a resource can be identified. This, in combination with
    the PID (above), will allow the computation of the impact of any
    contribution and the provenance of any resource.  
      
    *This is a solved problem, assuming [ORCID](http://orcid.org)
    continues to gain momentum. For past authors [VIAF](http://viaf.org)
    has identifiers (which are being incorporated into Wikipedia).*
7.  **Make use of trusted third-party authentication measures** so that
    users can easily work with multiple resources without having to log
    into each one separately.  
      
    *Again, a solved problem. People routinely use third parties such as
    Google and Facebook for this purpose.*
8.  **Build a repository for classifications** (classification bank)
    that will allow, in combination with the list of taxonomic names,
    automatic construction of taxonomies to close gaps in coverage.  
      
    *Let\'s not, let\'s focus on the only two classifications that
    actually matter because they are linked to data, namely GBIF and
    NCBI. If we want one classification to coalesce around make it GBIF
    (NCBI will grow anyway).*
9.  **Develop a single portal for currently accepted names** - one of
    the priority requirements for most users.  
      
    *Yup, still haven\'t got this, we clearly didn\'t get the memo about
    point 3.*
10. **Standards and tools are needed to structure data** into a linked
    format by using the potential of vocabularies and ontologies for all
    biodiversity facets, including: taxonomy, environmental factors,
    ecosystem functioning and services, and data streams like DNA (up to
    genomics).  
      
    *The most successful vocabulary we\'ve come up with (Darwin Core) is
    essentially an agreed way to label columns in Excel spreadsheets.
    I\'ve [argued
    elsewhere](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/07/post-gbic2012-thoughts.html)
    that focussing on vocabularies and ontologies distracts from the
    real prerequisite for linking stuff together, namely reusable
    identifiers (see 5). No point developing labels for links if you
    don\'t have the links.*
11. **Mechanisms to evaluate data quality and fitness-for-purpose** are
    required.  
      
    *Our data is inaccurate and full of holes, and we lack decent tools
    for visualising and fixing this (hence my interest in [putting the
    GBIF classification into
    GitHub](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2013/04/time-to-put-taxonomy-into-github.html)).*
12. **A next-generation infrastructure is needed** to manage
    ever-increasing amounts of observational data.  
      
    *Not our problem, see
    [doi:10.1038/nature11875](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11875) (by
    which I mean lots of people need massive storage, so it will be
    solved)*

  
Food for thought. I suspect we will see the gaggle of biodiversity
informatics projects will seek to align themselves with some of these
goals, carving up the territory. Sadly, we have yet to find a way to
coalesce critical mass around tackling these challenges. It\'s a cliché,
but I can\'t help thinking \"what would Google do?\" or, more,
precisely, \"what would a Google of biodiversity look like?\"


BMC Ecology has published Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts' white paper on biodiversity informatics:  Here are their 12 recommendations (with some comments of my own):
<strong>
 Open Data, should be normal
</strong>
practice and should embody the principles of being accessible, assessable, intelligible and usable.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities