🎉 🎉 CONGRATULATIONS to @UofGlasgow's @rdmpage for winning joint first prize in the 2018 @GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, the annual innovation competition to advance open science and open data for biodiversity. Well done, Prof Page! @IBAHCM #UofGWorldChangers pic.twitter.com/DjbmP90hTN
— UofG MVLS (@UofGMVLS) October 17, 2018
Quick note to express my delight and surprise that my entry for the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge come in joint first! My entry was Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph which built upon data from sources such as ALA, AFD, BioStor, CrossRef, ORCID), Wikispecies, and BLR.
I'm still tweaking Ozymandias, for example adding data on GBIF specimens (and maybe sequences from GenBank and BOLD) so that I can explore questions such as what is the lag time between specimen collection and description of a species. The bigger question I'm interested in is the extent to which knowledge graphs (aka RDF) can be used to explore biodiversity data.
For details on the other entries visit the list of winners at GBIF. The other first place winners Lien Reyserhove, Damiano Oldoni and Peter Desmet have generously donated half their prize to NumFOCUS which supports open source data science software:
Let’s give back! ❤️We decided to donate half of our @GBIF prize money (5000€) to @NumFOCUS which funds essential #opensource research software like @rOpenSci, #pandas and @ProjectJupyter. https://t.co/R3Bh0Tj8YX
— LifeWatch INBO (@LifeWatchINBO) October 18, 2018
This is a great way of acknowledging the debt many of us owe to developers of open source software that underpins the work of many researchers.
I hope GBIF and the wiser GBIF community found this year's Challenge to be worthwhile, I'm a big fan of anything which increases GBIF's engagement with developers and data analysts, and if the challenge runs again next year I encourage anyone with an interest in biodiversity informatics to consider taking part.
