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.
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.
The follow is a guest post by Bob Mesibov, who has contributed to iPhylo before. Like many iPhylo readers, I deal with large, pre-existing compilations of biodiversity data. The compilations come from museums, herbaria, aggregation projects and government agencies.
After experimenting with a dynamic, online version of my notes "Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph" I've published a static version in RIO: doi:10.3897/rio.2.e8767.
TL;DR; The Plant List is now in GBIF http://doi.org/10.15468/btkum2. Readers of this blog may recall that I've had a somewhat jaundiced view of The Plant List.
I’ve thrown together some notes on building a biodiversity knowledge graph, and in the interests of making it interactive it's in the form of a web page: http://bionames.org/~rpage/towards-knowledge-graph/. There are buttons to click that display live data, and I hope to dd more examples as I flesh out the ideas.
Last week (25-26 February) I was in London for CISCO Pit Stop event. Thursday evening was at the Natural History Museum where I gave a talk extolling the virtues of linking stuff together: My slides are here: Cisco Digital Catapult from Roderic Page Friday we assembled at the Digital Catapult Centre, which as Sandy Knapp notes, has some amazing views from it's 9th floor.