I've written a short paper entitled "Liberating links between datasets using lightweight data publishing: an example using plant names and the taxonomic literature" (phew) and put a preprint on bioRxiv (https://doi.org/10.1101/343996) while I figure out where to publish it. Here's the abstract: In some ways the paper is simply a record of me trying to figure out how to publish a project that I've been working on for several years, namely

First off, let me say that what follows is a lot of arm waving to try and obscure how little I understand what I'm talking about. I'm going to sketch out what I think is a "radical" idea for a GBIF Challenge entry. The motivation for this idea comes from several sources: 1. GBIF is (under-)funded by direct contributions from governments, hence each year it essentially "begs" for money.

David Shorthouse (@dpsspiders) makes some very cool things, and his latest project World Taxonomists & Systematists is a great example of using automation to assemble a list of the world's taxonomists and systematists. The project uses ORCID.

Last year I finished my four-year stint as Chair of the GBIF Science Committee. During that time, partly as a result of my urging, GBIF launched an annual "GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge", and I'm please that this year GBIF is continuing to run the challenge. In 2015 and 2016 the challenge received some great entries.

It's been a little quiet on this blog as I've been teaching, and spending a lot of time data wrangling and trying to get my head around "data lakes" and "triple stores". So there are a few things to catch up on, and a few side projects to report on. I continue to play with iSpecies, which is a simple mashup off biodiversity data sources.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Nico Franz and Beckett Sterner created a stir last year with a preprint in bioRxiv about expert validation (or the lack of it) in the "backbone" classifications used by aggregators.

These notes are the result of a few events I've been involved in the last couple of months, including TDWG 2017 in Ottawa, a thesis defence in Paris, and a meeting of the Science Advisory Board of the Natural History Museum in London. For my own benefit if no one else's, I want to sketch out some (less than coherent) ideas for how a natural history museum becomes truly digital.

David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the new views of life afforded by technological advances in cameras, drones, diving gear, and submersibles. One might hope that the supporting information online reflected the equivalent technological advances made in describing and sharing information. Sadly, this is not the case.

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.

Notes on how many georeferenced DNA sequences there are in GenBank, and how many could potentially be georeferenced.

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.