The last few days I've been re-reading articles about Ted Nelson's work (including ill-fated Project Xanadu), reading articles celebrating his work (brought together in the open access book "Intertwingled"), playing with Hypothes.is, and thinking about annotation and linking.
Given that Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) all share the goal of making information free, open, and accessible, there seems to be a lot of potential for useful collaboration. Below I sketch out some ideas. BHL as a source of references for Wikipedia Wikipedia likes to have sources cited to support claims in its articles. BHL has a lot of articles that could be cited by Wikipedia articles.
I'll be taking a break shortly, so I thought I'd try to gather some thoughts on a few projects/ideas that I'm working on. These are essentially extended notes to myself to jog my memory when I return to these topics. BOLD data into GBIF Following on from work on getting mosquito data into GBIF I've been looking at DNA barcoding data. BOLD data is mostly absent from GBIF.
Awoke this morning to the sad news (via Scott Miller) that Scott Federhen of the NCBI had died. Anyone using the NCBI taxonomy is a beneficiary of Scott's work on bring together taxonomy and genomic data. Scott contributed both directly and indirectly to this blog.
Some notes to self about future directions for the "million DNA barcodes map" http://iphylo.org/~rpage/bold-map/. At the moment we have an interactive map that we can pan and zoom, and click on a marker to get a list of one or more barcodes at the location. We can also filter by major taxonomic group. Here are some ideas on what could be next. Search At the moment search is simply browsing the map.
Kew has released a new report today, entitled the State of the World's Plants, complete with it's own web site https://stateoftheworldsplants.com. Its aim: This is, of course, a laudable goal, and a lot of work has gone into this report, and yet there are some things about the report that I find very frustrating. PDF but no ePub It's nice to have an interactive web site as well as a glossy PDF, but why restrict yourself to a PDF?
Despite the well deserved scepticism about dashboards voiced by Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern (see Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard, I discovered this by reading Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning by Leigh Dodds @ldodds) I'm intrigued by the idea a dashboard for biodiversity. We could have several different kinds of information, displayed in a single place.
One of my frustrations with the GBIF portal is that it is hard to drill down and search in a specific area. You have to zoom in and then click for a list of occurrences in the current bounding box of the map. You can't, for example, draw a polygon such as the boundary of a protected area and search within that area.
For anyone doing research or involved in scientific infrastructure, demonstrating the "impact" of those activities is becoming increasingly important.
One of GBIF's goals is to provide up to date, comprehensive data on the distribution of species. Although GBIF's taxonomy and geographic scope is global, not all species are equal, in the sense that the need for information on some species is potentially much more pressing. An example are mosquitoes of the genus Aedes , such as the species A. aegypti and A. albopictus that spread the Zika virus.
As part of BHL's "Celebrating 10 years of inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge" at the NHM and Kew Gardens in London, I was interviewed by Martin Kalfatovic (@UDCMRK). We chatted about BHL, the work I've been doing on BioStor, and the future of BHL.