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've been involved in a few Twitter exchanges about the upcoming pro-iBiosphere meeting regarding the "Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System (OBKMS)", which is the topic of the meeting. Because for the life of me I can't find an explanation of what "Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System" is, other than vague generalities and appeals to the magic pixie dust that is "Linked Open Data" and "RDF", I've been grumbling away on Twitter.

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.

Note to self on citation matching. Looking for this paper "Fishes of the Marshall and Marianas islands. Vol. I. Families from Asymmetrontidae through Siganidae" I Googled it, adding "bistro" as a search term to see if I'd already added it to BioStor.

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.

It is almost a year to the day that I released BioNames, a database of "taxa, texts, and trees". This project was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge.