If you compare the impact that BHL and Plazi have on GBIF, then it's clear that BHL is almost invisible. Plazi has successfully in carved out a niche where they generate tens of thousands of datasets from text mining the taxonomic literature, whereas BHL is a participant in name only. It's not as if BHL lacks geographic data.

Is it's been a while since I've blogged here. The last few months have been, um, interesting for so many reasons.

It's funny how some images stick in the mind. A few years ago Chris Freeland (@chrisfreeland), then working for Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created a visualisation of BHL content relevant to the African continent. It's a nice example of small multiples. For more than a decade (gulp) I've been extracting articles from the BHL and storing them in BioStor.

A post by on the Plaza blog Expanded access to images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository has prompted me to write up a little toy I created earlier this week. The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a repository of taxonomic papers hosted by Zenodo. Where possible Plazi have extracted individual images and added those to the BLR, even if the article itself is not open access.

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.

Last week I was at WikiCite 2017, a fascinating three day event in Vienna. Wikicite is "a proposal to build a bibliographic database in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects", and is attracting increasing attention from academics, librarians, publishers, data geeks, and others. You can get a sense of the project by following @WikiCite on Twitter.

In preparation for WikiCite 2017 I'm looking more closely at extracting bibliographic information from Wikispecies. The WikiCite project "is a proposal to build a bibliographic database in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects". One reason for doing this is so that each factual statement in WikiData can be linked to evidence for that statement.

I've added an experimental feature to BioStor that uses data from Wikidata and Wikispecies to augment what information BioStor displays on authors.

Given a big corpus of literature one of the fun things to do is look at how the use of a term has changed over time. When did people first use a particular word? When did one word start to replace another, etc.? Google's Ngram Viewer is perhaps the best known tool for exploring these questions.

I've been experimenting with simple spatial search in BioStor, as shown in the demo below. If you go to the map on BioStor you can use the tools on the left to draw a box or a polygon on the map, and BioStor will search it's database for articles that mention localities that occur in that region. If you click on a marker you can see the title of the article, clicking on that title takes you to the article itself.