One of the things the biodiversity informatics community has struggled to do is come up with a list of all natural history collections (Taylor, 2016). Most recently GrBio attempted to do this, and appealed for community help to curate the list (Schindel et al., 2016), but this did not emerge, and at the time of writing GrBio is moribund.

I've written up my entry for the 2018 GBIF Challenge ("Ozymandias") and posted a preprint on Biorxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/04/485854). The DOI is https://doi.org/10.1101/485854 which, last time I checked, still needs to be registered. The abstract appears below. I'll let the preprint sit there for a little while before I summon the enthusiasm to revisit it, tidy it up, and submit it for publication.

I've put a short note up on bioRxiv about ways to geocode nucleotide sequences in databases such as GenBank. The preprint is "Geocoding genomic databases using GBIF" https://doi.org/10.1101/469650.

There's a slow-burning discussion on taxonomic concepts on Github that I am half participating in. As seems inevitable in any discussion of taxonomy, there's a lot of floundering about given that there's lots of jargon - much of it used in different ways by different people - and people are coming at the problem from different perspectives. In one sense, taxonomy is pretty straightforward.

Being in Ottawa last week for a hackathon meant I could catch up with David Shorthouse (@dpsSpiders. David has been doing some neat work on linking specimens to identifiers for researchers, such as ORCIDs, and tracking citations of specimens in the literature. David's Bloodhound tool processes lots of GBIF data for occurrences with names of those who collected or identified specimens.

I spent last week in Ottawa at a "Ecobiomics" hackathon organised by Joel Sachs. Essentially we spent a week exploring the application of linked data to various topics in biodiversity, with an emphasis on looking at working examples.

Quick note to express my delight and surprise that my entry for the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge come in joint first! My entry was Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph which built upon data from sources such as ALA, AFD, BioStor, CrossRef, ORCID), Wikispecies, and BLR.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. In 2005, GBIF released Arthur Chapman's Principles of Data Quality and Principles and Methods of Data Cleaning: Primary Species and Species-Occurrence Data as freely available electronic publications. Their impact on museums and herbaria has been minimal.

I've submitted an entry for the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. It's a couple of weeks before the deadline but I will be away then so have decided to submit early. My entry is Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph.

I've made a video walkthrough of Ozymandias, which I described in this post. It's a bit, um, long, so I'll need to come up with a shorter version. Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

In the spirit of release early and release often, here is the first workable version of a biodiversity knowledge graph that I've been working on for Australian animals (for some background on knowledge graphs see Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph now in RIO). The core of this knowledge graph is a classification of animals from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) combined with data on taxonomic names and publications from the Australian