Daniel Mietchen (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)

 

For two days in February 2014, a pro-iBiosphere workshop on mark-up of biodiversity literature brought together a group of 20 participants at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. In an introductory talk, Rod Page of the University of Glasgow presented the idea of a biodiversity knowledge graph that interlinks the biodiversity literature with the wider biodiversity information landscape. He then discussed a number of use cases for mark-up - namely for archiving, display and citation linking - and questioned whether it was actually necessary for identifying nodes and extracting edges of the knowledge graph, which could be achieved by simple indexing. He also discussed collaborative editing and version control with regards to mark-up.

 

With this introductory presentation having set the stage for discussing mark-up of the biodiversity literature in general terms and from a long-term perspective, the following presentations looked at specific subsets of that literature corpus, at specific use cases, at specific approaches to mark-up, and at workflows and business models around that. For example, Dimitris Koureas of the Natural History Museum in London discussed how the mark-up of specimen records in the literature could help with the digitization of specimen labels (which are often transcribed in systematic reviews of taxa or collections), and how the tracking of specimen citations in the literature could allow to assess the impact of collections on current and past research. Another perspective was provided by William Ullate of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, who described how BHL is ramping up its efforts on mark-up, including through gamification.

 

Throughout the workshop, there was a lively discussion, and the individual talks were given not according to a fixed schedule but when the respective topic came up in the discussion. All presentations are linked from the workshop page on the pro-iBiosphere wiki.

 

Figure 1: The Biodiversity Knowledge Graph. By Roderic Page.