The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is open! From the official announcement First prize is €20,000, full details on prizes and entry requirements are on the Challenge web site.

Following on from the discussion of the African chameleon data, I've started to explore Angelique Hjarding's data in more detail. The data is available from figshare (doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.1141858), so I've grabbed a copy and put it in github. Several things are immediately apparent. There is a lot of ungeoreferenced data. With a little work this could be geotagged and hence placed on a map.

Just back from GB21, the GBIF Governing Board meeting (the first such meeting I've attended). It was in New Delhi, and this was also my first time in india, which is an amazing place.

This is guest post by Angelique Hjarding in response to discussion on this blog about the paper below. Thank you for highlighting our recent publication and for the very interesting comments. We wanted to take the opportunity to address some of the issues brought up in both your review and from reader comments. One of the most important issues that has been raised is the sharing of cleaned and vetted datasets.

If we view biodiversity data as part of the "biodiversity knowledge graph" then specimens are a fairly central feature of that graph. I'm looking at ways to link specimens to sequences, taxa, publications, etc., and doing this across multiple data providers. Here are some rough notes on trying to model this in a simple way.

Update: Angelique Hjarding and her co-authors have responded in a guest post on iPhylo. The quality and fitness for use of GBIF-mobilised data is a topic of interest to anyone that uses GBIF data.

I stumbled across this paper (found on the GBIF Public Library): The first sentence of the abstract makes the paper sound a bit of a slog to read, but actually it's a great fun, full of pithy comments on the state of digital humanities. Almost all of this is highly relevant to mobilising natural history data.

I'm adding more charts to the GBIF Chart tool, including some to explore the type status of specimens from the Solomon Islands. There are nearly 500 holotypes from this region, so quite a few new species have been discovered in this region.

Following on from the previous post on visualising GBIF data, I've added some more interactivity.

Tim Roberston and the ream at GBIF are working on some nice visualisations of GBIF data, and have made an early release available for viewing: http://analytics.gbif-uat.org.