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Martin R. KalfatovicFind me: UDCMRK | Travel.Leisure.Pursuits: UDC793 | Twitter: @udcmrk | Skype: martin.kalfatovic | Flickr Fotos | VIAF ID: 32094717 (Personal)
Showing posts with label TDWG 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TDWG 2013. Show all posts
Friday, November 01, 2013
And #TDWG 2013 comes to a close: "... and there emerged Florence, a magic city where people thought and did the most extraordinary things." #TDWG 2013 comes to a close
"The well-know world had come to a close and there emerged Florence, a magic city where people thought and did the most extraordinary things." E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Chuck Miller thanks everyone for a great meeting and wishes safe travels. See you all next year!
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Martin R. KalfatovicFind me: UDCMRK | Travel.Leisure.Pursuits: UDC793 | Twitter: @udcmrk | Skype: martin.kalfatovic | Flickr Fotos | VIAF ID: 32094717 (Personal)
"Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten" Dante ... or, the closing #TDWG banquet
"Blessed are the few who sit at the table where the bread of the angels is eaten, and most unfortunate those who share the food of sheep! (Oh beati quelli pochi che seggiono a quella mensa dove lo pane delli angeli si manuca! e miseri quelli che colle pecore hanno comune cibo!)." - Dante, Convivio, I.i.7
Tonight, the 2013 TDWG Conference banquet took place at Osteria dei Baroncelli. A splendid time was had by all on this Halloween!
2013/10 2013 TDWG Dinner, a set on Flickr.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Bioinformaticians want metadata to be open / data interactions w/ @EuropeanaEu by Bit Jacob #tdwg
More info on NH data interactions w/ @EuropeanaEu. Asked audience of we had problems with CC0 metadata licensing. Shouts of no! When asked why, crowd answered we were the wrong group to ask. Bioinformaticians want metadata to be open!
"Natural History meets Culture" Wolfgang Koller on BioCASE and Europeana #tdwg
Paper coauthored with Heimo Rainer.
Boris Jacob (@editvital) kicking off @OpenUpEu session at #Tdwg
Good session giving overview of the way OpenUp! is getting natural history collections data to a wider GLAM community.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
@BioDivLibrary symposium at #TDWG 2013 on stage now in Florence
This symposium will focus on strategies for creating, expanding and maintaining a multinational digital library programme; digitisation platforms, standards and services; creating value-added features for discipline-specific communities; use of social media and outreach to increase use and build new audiences; and migration from projects to sustainable programmes.
This session will include presentations from a spectrum of partners from different project-, country-, and continent- collaborators sharing their experiences on facing the mentioned topics of this Symposium and promote a discussion on next steps to improve the needs of scientists.
Martin R. Kalfatovic
A Current Overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
This presentation will provide a general overview of recent BHL activities and the BHL’s engagement with taxonomic communities. It will include an overview of how BHL’s focus on new vision, mission and goals help to build important tools and services that will help BHL better serve the taxonomic and other communities. Changes to the organizational structure, global activities, technical development and content acquisition will be introduced and covered in more detail by the other panelists; additionally, new content types for BHL in the future will include Field Books, a more robust discovery of illustrations, and new content from global partners.
Trish Rose-Sandler
Finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within BHL texts: the Art of Life project
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has now achieved a critical mass of digitized historic texts – over 41 million pages and counting. The BHL portal can be searched by several access points including title, author, subject, and scientific name. But, what is largely hidden and entirely unsearchable are the millions of natural history illustrations found with the BHL books and journals. These visual resources which include drawings, paintings, photographs, maps and diagrams represent work by some of the finest botanical and zoological illustrators in the world, including the likes of John James Audubon, Georg Dionysus Ehret, and Pierre Redouté.
Many of the illustrations are the first recorded descriptions of much of the world’s biota, providing the scientific foundation for contemporary taxonomic research and conservation assessments. Some of them are the only verifiable resource about an organism and their existence on Earth due to changes in global climate patterns and rapid loss of natural habitat for many species. Audiences for these illustrations also cross a variety of disciplines and include: biologists, artists, historians, illustrators, graphic designers, archivists, educators, students, and citizen scientists.
In 2012, the Missouri Botanical Garden was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a project called The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). This talk will discuss the Art of Life objectives and current status. It will go into detail about the algorithms and schema designed for finding which pages contain illustrations and describing the subsequent output. Finally the talk will discuss the project’s benefits for the scientific community such as improving access to a significant collection of public domain images related to biodiversity.
Jiri Frank
Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe - past, present and future
Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe project had a clear vision and mission – mobilise and preserve digital European biodiversity heritage literature and facilitate the open access to this literature through a multilingual community portal, the Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) and Europeana portal. During the project BHL Europe developed the multifunctional portal, an ingest system, additional services using name services as CoL, PESI and VIAF, a unique metadata format “Open Literature Exchange Format (OLEF)” -- able to handle bibliographic data (MODS), policy expressions IPR (ODRL), still image data (MIX) and scientific names (DwC Taxon Terms), and also BLE. The project officially ended in June 2012, but the vision and mission still continue. At the completion of the funding, several institutions from Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, United Kingdom, and Belgium continued to advance the BHLE technical maintenance and the content flow. Content ingest started just before the project end and is continuing. The BHLE portal currently has about 20,000 items representing about 1.8 million pages; new content is added daily via the ingest system. BHL Europe still has more than 70,000 items in the pipeline ready to be processed and in March 2015 will start to ingest whole BHL content. There are several requests from new content providers and also continue with dissemination together with the Global BHL family via social media channels. BHLE is no longer a project but a product and service supported by the afore mentioned consortium which represents the European node in Global BHL. BHL Europe is now in process of negotiations to become a part of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) to help mobilise even more European content, partners and possible funding. The future is always a challenge, but BHLE group will do their best to be part of it.
Lucy Waruingi
Discovering African biodiversity literature collections
On Monday, 15 April 2013, BHL-Africa was born! The launch ceremony was hosted by SANBI at the Pretoria National Botanical Garden. It began with a welcome by Dr. Tanya Abrahamse, SANBI CEO, after which she and Nancy Gwinn (Chair of the BHL Executive Committee) signed the BHL-Africa MOU (Memorandum of Understanding). Nancy Gwinn then gave a presentation detailing the history of BHL's development, and Anne-Lise Fourie, Assistant Director for SANBI libraries, gave an overview of the BHL-Africa vision, mission, and benefits.
BHL-Africa aims to provide open access to the valuable information held in Africa's biodiversity institutions. Towards this end, the global BHL family works with the international taxonomic community, rights holders, and other interested parties to ensure that this biodiversity heritage is made available to a global audience through open access principles. Across the continent people are embracing mobile technology as communication infrastructure expands and the uptake for these digitized resources is expanding, thus consideration to adapt mobile technology within the BHL consortium will be key in Africa.
Quote: This is of great value to Africa, as we are a continent of long-distance learning.” Anne-Lise Fourie
William Ulate
Expanding the Biodiversity Heritage Library
BHL has been continuously expanding in terms of quantity and types of content, geographical coverage and services provided, answering requests from diverse communities, including scientists, and particularly taxonomists. BHL currently includes more than 41 million pages, 118,000 volumes, almost 63,000 titles and since March of this year, almost 95,000 articles from BioStor and the number of taxonomic names occurrences within the text has increased substantially with the new services from the Global Names Architecture, totaling now more than 150 million appearances of names. The incorporation of segments has brought the challenge of deduplicating new article titles contributed by our providers. Solving this task by clustering segments together has allowed us to categorize these relations opening the door to new functionality for our everyday end users. Technically, there are paths that could be followed if enough resources were available, like assigning unique identifiers to legacy articles; tagging and extracting entities from the text. The wish list goes on, including citation services, segments linking out to other repositories, crowdsourcing OCR improvements and transcription, legacy articles DOIs, tagging and extracting identities, among other cool things.
Connie Rinaldo
Please phrase your question in the form of feedback...
In 2009/2010, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and BHL-Europe requested user feedback with a targeted and fairly complex user survey. Changes to the BHL interface and features were made based on the results of these surveys. Since 2011, BHL staff have interviewed 32 users and published these interviews on the BHL blog. Who has been interviewed? What do they like and what would they like to see change? What issues have been addressed by interface and backend changes? Are there common themes presented by the users and have these themes changed since 2009? I will summarize and sort user comments. Feedback is always welcome through the feedback link at BHL. What should we be aiming for next? We are asking you for your thoughts now and would welcome ideas on other ways gather your suggestions. One potentially new direction is to move from being a trusted, bounded resource to a comprehensive resource providing external links to other biodiversity information providers and external links to citations with no full text. Please phrase your question in the form of feedback….
Cynthia Parr (@EOL) and Patricia Mergen (@africamuseumbe), candidates for President and Secretary of #TDWG
Cynthia and Patricia are running unopposed for the offices, respectively, of President and Secretary, of TDWG. The full slate of candidates is here. Voting will commence late on 29 October 2013 with results shortly thereafter.
Monday, October 28, 2013
#TDWG session on "Empowering International eCollaboration for Sustainability" (speakers and topics)
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| Fredrik Ronquist |
Speakers:
Anne Maglia: Strategies and partnerships for enabling infrastructure sustainability
Supporting the long-term sustainability of infrastructure is an ongoing challenge for funding agencies. While infrastructure demands grow faster than the resources available to support them, there is a need to balance between supporting novel developments and the long-term maintenance of critical resources. In this talk, I will discuss strategies for leveraging limited resources and forging strategic partnerships to enhance the likelihood of resource sustainability. As an example, I will highlight the Advancing the Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program, the Networked Integrated Biocollections Alliance (NIBA), and several other related activities.
Fredrik Ronquist: Building sustainable biodiversity information systems
Over the last decades, we have seen the emergence of a large number of biodiversity information systems and tools developed by single groups with short-term funding. For the global biodiversity informatics community to advance beyond this initial explorative phase, it is essential that sustainable long-term solutions can be found for the core systems and technologies. Drawing primarily from experience gained in the Morphbank (http://morphbank.net), DINA (http://www.dina-project.net), and BalticDiversity (http://balticdiversity.eu/) projects, but also a number of other recent and ongoing initiatives, I discuss the social, political and technical challenges involved in promoting eCollaboration and finding sustainable long-term solutions for biodiversity information systems and technologies.
Antonio Mauro Saraiva: We can foster collaboration and improve the results of biodiversity informatics
Biodiversity informatics as a field has evolved significantly over the years. Many information systems and other computational tools have been developed. A number of initiatives have flourished, noticeably those of standards development, which have been key elements for achieving the current amount of data digitized and integrated in data portals. Nonetheless biodiversity and ecosystem services are still under increasing threat and their conservation and sustainable use require an even faster response.
The biodiversity informatics community has an important role to play in that scenario. It has the responsibility of providing improved computational tools and information systems which are more effective (helping decision and policy making), more user friendly, less costly to develop and to maintain (more sustainable), and reach a wider audience worldwide (biodiversity does not respect borders and its conservation requires global cooperation), among other characteristics.
This brings us to the issue of how we can more systematically learn from the community’s previous knowledge and experience and build on top of it, potentially saving time and money. In other words, how can we increase collaboration in project development? This poses cultural and technical challenges. One important aspect is awareness and information availability. Knowing what has been done, and how, is a key aspect. Systems and tools development not always result in widely visible publications and this prevent others from knowing about them. So mechanisms and opportunities to publicize such developments should be encouraged.
Sharing knowledge on tools development is another key aspect. A lot has been said about data sharing policies, especially data obtaining with public funding. Should software code sharing follow the same rule? Funding agencies policies can also be an obstacle, as they prioritize funding new ideas and systems, but there may be sound technical and budgetary arguments in favor of software reuse.
Standards embed a lot of knowledge and their development and evolution must be stimulated. Nonetheless they can be difficult to translate into practical tools, so the groups involved in standards development should be encouraged to provide guidance on implementation. That could be even leveraged if software code would also be shared. Additionally a service oriented computing approach should be stimulated to result from the work of some groups and initiatives. Those services can be embedded and orchestrated in new systems. An approach that must be avoided is the “come contribute to mysystem”, which tries to attract collaborators to provide data or content without giving back too much (or anything).
Finally, capacity building is an important way of disseminating knowledge and skills that must be stimulated. The development of the Pollinator Thematic Network of the InterAmerican Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN-PTN) gave us experience on this matter. From a system development point of view, the contact with TDWG and the biodiversity informatics community was fundamental for us to achieve our goals. Relying on GBIF´s data portal code was essential for us to be able to build our portal, that included dealing with other data, namely interaction data. Caring for the human aspect of the network was also essential for PTN´s success.
Henry L. Bart and Patricia Merge: Introduction: Empowering International eCollaboration for Sustainability
Over the past few years, with generous funding from the JRS Biodiversity Foundation (http://www.jrsbdf.org/), the authors have been supporting participation of biodiversity informaticians from Sub-Saharan African countries in annual TDWG conferences. Biodiversity Information specialists from Madagascar, Rwanda and Zimbabwe will be participating in the 2013 TDWG conference. The ultimate aim of the travel awards is to engage more African biodiversity information scientists in the activities of TDWG, including participation in TDWG task and working groups, and helping them to build research collaborations with TDWG members from other regions of the world. We are surveying past TDWG travel awardees (2011 and 2012 conferences) to assess how well these aims are being accomplished. The survey results will be discussed as part of this presentation. An ongoing collaboration with biodiversity scientists in Nairobi, Kenya, which contributed to Nairobi’s selection as site of the 2014 TDWG conference, will also be discussed. The 2014 TDWG conference provides a unique opportunity to expand Sub-Saharan African participation and engagement in TDWG, and to develop effective strategies for sustaining this important activity.
Eric Meyer talking on Socio-Technical issues of data at #TDWG
Interesting talk on interactions of people and tech. Has some good comments on our use of the term "users" because all too often tech people see users as the problem and not the key participants/actors in the use of the technology.
Some other notes in building his talk:
- More research/science/scholarship is being done by teams
- Research computing is becoming more popular (with caveats); names changes over the years: Grid, Cloud eResearch, Supercomputing, Big Data (the current au courant term)
- How projects move to become infrastructure
Recommended reading:
- Whitley, R. (2000) Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, 2nd ed., Oxford U. Press
Sunday, October 27, 2013
The classic portrait of a dodo in the guise of Dante after Botticelli for TDWG 2013
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| School of Botticelli, "Portrait of Didus Ineptus", 2013 |
Looking forward to the opening reception at La Specola, which might just have a dodo!
Saturday, October 26, 2013
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