The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. There's still time (to 31 March ) to enter a dataset in the 2020 Darwin Core Million, and by way of encouragement I'll celebrate here the best and worst Darwin Core datasets I've seen. The two best are real stand-outs because both are collections of IPT resources rather than one-off wonders. The first is published by the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. You're feeling pretty good about your institution's collections data.

Just a note that ORCID serves data using terms from schema.org, and has done for a while (since April 2018), but somehow I missed this. You can get linked data in JSON-LD using content negotiation.

Yes, this is a clickbait headline, and yes, it may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to complain about crappy data in GBIF, but my point here is raise concerns about the impact of metagenomic data on GBIF, and how difficult it may be to track down the causes of errors.

This week I attended the SWAT4(HC)LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences) meeting in Edinburgh. Although a relatively small meeting, SWAT4(HC)LS attracts some big names in the field and featured keynotes by Denny Vrandečić (founder of Wikidata), Dov Greenbaum, Birgitta König-Ries, and Helen Parkinson.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on iPhylo. Since returning from a fun and productive time in Australia there have been a bunch of professional and personal things that have needed attending too. In amongst all this I attended Biodiversity Next in Leiden, a large (by biodiversity informatics standards) conference with the tag line "Building a global infrastructure for biodiversity data.

On Tuesday I was in Canberra to visit the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO and give a talk on knowledge graphs.

While working with linked data and ways to explore and visualise information, I keep coming back to the Haystack project, which is now over a decade old. Among the tools developed was the Haystack application, which enabled a user to explore all sorts of structured data. Below is a screen shot of Haystack showing a sequence for Homo sapiens cyclin T1 (CCNT1), transcript variant a, mRNA.

I'm doing some work with Nicole Kearney (@nicolekearney) at the Melbourne Museum on the general theme of "linking all the things". It's the end of the first full week we've had, so here's a quick update of what we've been up to. Brainstorming The things we want to do are being captured as a project on GitHub. This is where we come up with ideas, comment on then, then try to figure out which ones can be done.

Quick note on Frankenplace, a cool search tool that displays the geographic distribution of documents that match the user's query as a heatmap. Details of how the tool works are given in: At the heart of the method is a discrete global grid that divides the world up into small areas of the same size.

I've tweaked Ozymandias to now include short natural language summaries (snippets) for various taxa. This makes the output a little more friendly and informative. For example, here's a snippet from the page on Cephalodesmius , a dung beetle that makes its own dung. These snippets come from Wikipedia, well actually, from the DBpedia project.