Annotating GBIF, from datasets to nanopublications

Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic.

Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files. These are for the most part simply CSV tables (spreadsheets) with some associated administrivia (AKA metadata). GBIF consumes Darwin Core Archives, does some post-processing to clean things up a little, then indexes the contents on key fields such as catalogue number, taxon name, and geographic coordinates.

What I'm proposing is that we make use of this infrastructure, in that any annotation is itself a Darwin Core Archive file that GBIF ingests. I envisage three typical use cases:

1. A user downloads some GBIF data, cleans it for their purposes (e.g., by updating taxonomic names, adding some georeferencing, etc.) then uploads the edited data to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive. This edited file gets a DOI (unless the user has go one already, say by storing the data in a digital archive like Zenodo).
2. A user takes some GBIF data and enhances it by adding links to, for example, sequences in GenBank for which the GBIF occurrences are voucher specimens, or references which cite those occurrences. The enhanced data set is uploaded to GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive and, as above, gets a DOI.
3. A user edits an individual GBIf record, say using an interface like this. The result is stored as a Darwin Core Archive with a single row (corresponding to the edit occurrence), and gets a DOI (this is a nanopublication, of which more later)

Note that I'm ignoring the other type of annotation, which is to simply say "there is a problem with this record". This annotation doesn't add data, but instead flags an issue. GBIF has a mechanism for doing this already, albeit one that is deeply unsatisfactory and isn't integrated with the portal (you can't tell whether anyone has raised an issue for a record).

Note also that at this stage we've done nothing that GBIF doesn't already do, or isn't about to do (e.g., minting DOIs for datasets). Now, there is one inevitable consequence of this approach, namely that we will have more than one record for the same occurrence, the original one in GBIF, and the edited record. But, we are in this situation already. GBIF has duplicate records, lots of them.

Duplication

As an example, consider the following two occurrences for Psilogramma menephron:

occurrence	taxon	longitude	latitude	catalogue number	sequence
887386322	Psilogramma menephron Cramer, 1780	145.86301	-17.44	BC ZSM Lep 01337
1009633027	Psilogramma menephron Cramer, 1780	145.86	-17.44	KJ168695	KJ168695

These two occurrences come from the Zoologische Staatssammlung Muenchen - International Barcode of Life (iBOL) - Barcode of Life Project Specimen Data and Geographically tagged INSDC sequences data sets, respectively. They are for the same occurrence (you can verify this by looking at the metadata data for the sequence KJ168695 where the specimen_voucher field is "BC ZSM Lep 01337").

What do we do about this? One approach would be to group all such occurrences into clusters that represent the same thing. We are then in a position to do some interesting things, such as compare different estimates of the same values. In the example above, there is clearly a difference in precision of geographic locality between the two datasets. There are some nice techniques available for synthesising multiple estimates of the same value (e.g., Bayesian belief networks), so we could provide for each cluster a summary of the possible values for each field. We can also use these methods to build up a picture of the reliability of different sources of annotation.

In a sense, we can regard one record (1009633027) as adding an annotation to the other (887386322), namely adding the DNA sequence KJ168695 (in Darwin Core parlance, "associatedSequences=[KJ168695]").

But the key point here is that GBIF will have to at some point address the issue of massive duplication of data, and in doing so it will create an opportunity to solve the annotation problem as well.

Github and DOIs

In terms of practicalities, it's worth noting that we could use github to manage editing GBIF data, as I've explored in GBIF and Github: fixing broken Darwin Core Archives. Although github might not be ideal (there some very cool alternatives being developed, such as dat, see also interview with Max Ogden) it has the nice feature that you can publish a release and get a DOI via its integration with Zenodo. So people can work on datasets and create citable identifiers at the same time.

Nanopublications

If we consider that a Darwin Core Archive is basically a set of rows of data, then the minimal unit is a single row (corresponding to a single occurrence). This is the level at which some users will operate. They will see an error in GBIF and be able to edit the record (e.g., by adding georeferencing, an identification, etc.). One challenge is how to create incentives for doing this. One approach is to think in terms of nanopublications, which are:

A nanopublication is the smallest unit of publishable information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author.

A nanopublication comprises three elements:

1. The assertion: In this context the Darwin Core record would be the assertion. It might be a minimal record in that, say, it only listed the fields relevant to the annotation.
2. The provenance: the evidence for the assertion. This might be the DOI of a publication that supports the annotation.
3. The publication information: metadata for the nanopublication, including a way to cite the nanopublication (such as a DOI), and information on the author of the nanopublication. For example, the ORCID of the person annotating the GBIF record.

As an example, consider GBIF occurrence 668534424 for specimen FMNH 235034, which according to GBIF is a specimen of Rhacophorus reinwardtii. In a recent paper

Matsui, M., Shimada, T., & Sudin, A. (2013, August). A New Gliding Frog of the Genus Rhacophorus from Borneo . Current Herpetology. Herpetological Society of Japan. doi:10.5358/hsj.32.112

Matsui et al. assert that FMNH 235034 is actually Rhacophorus borneensis based on a phylogenetic analysis of a sequence (GQ204713) derived from that specimen. In which case, we could have something like this:

• Assertion
  • 668534424 identifiedAs Rhacophorus borneensis
• Provenance
  • doi:10.5358/hsj.32.112
• PublicationInfo
  • author: 0000-0002-7101-9767
  • identifier doi:xxxx

The nanopublication standard is evolving, and has a lot of RDF baggage that we'd need to simplify to make fit the Darwin Core model of a flat row of data, but you could imagine having a nanopublication which is a Darwin Core Archive that includes the provenance and publication information, and gets a citable identifier so that the person who created the nanopublication (in the example above I am the author of the nanopublication) can get credit for the work involved in creating the annotation. Using citable DOIs and ORCIDs to identify the nanpublication and its author embeds the nanopublication in the wider citation graph.

Note that nanopublications are not really any different from larger datasets, indeed we can think of a dataset of, say, 1000 rows as simply an aggregation of nanopublications. However, one difference is that I think GBIF would have to setup the infrastructure to manage the creation of nanopublications (which is basically collect user's input, add user id, save and mint DOI). Whereas users working with large datasets may well be happy to work with those on, say github or some other data editing environment, people willing to edit single records are unlikely to want to mess with that complexity.

What about the original providers?

Under this model, the original data provider's contribution to GBIF isn't touched. If a user adds an annotation that amounts to adding a copy of the record, with some differences (corresponding to the user's edits). Now, the data provider may chose to accept those edits, in which case they can edit their own database using whatever system they have in place, and then the next time GBIF re-harvests the data, the original record in GBIF gets updated with the new data (this assumes that data providers have stable ids for their records). Under this approach we free ourselves from thinking about complicated messaging protocols between providers and aggregators, and we also free ourselves from having to wait until an edit is "approved" by a provider. Any annotation is available instantly.

Summary

My goal here is to sketch out what I think is a straightforward way to tackle annotation that makes use of what GBIF is already doing (aggregating Darwin Core Archives) or will have to do real soon now (cluster duplicates). The annotated and cleaned data can, of course, live anywhere (and I'm suggesting that it could live on github and be archived on Zenodo), so people who clean and edit data are not simply doing it for the good of GBIF, they are creating data sets that can be used independently and be cited independently. Likewise, even if somebody goes to the trouble of fixing a single record in GBIF, they get a citable unit of work that will be linked to their academic profile (via ORCD).

Another aspect of this approach is that we don't actually need to wait for GBIF to do this. If we adopt Darwin Core Archive as the format for annotations, we can create annotations, mint DOIs, and build our own database of annotated data, with a view to being able to move that work to GBIF if and when GBIF is ready.