2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge now open

Last year I finished my four-year stint as Chair of the GBIF Science Committee. During that time, partly as a result of my urging, GBIF launched an annual "GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge", and I'm please that this year GBIF is continuing to run the challenge. In 2015 and 2016 the challenge received some great entries.

Last year's challenge (GBIF Challenge 2017: Liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse didn't attract quite the same degree of attention, and GBIF quietly didn't make an award. I think part of the problem was that there's a fine balance between having a wide open challenge which attracts all sorts of interesting entries, some a little off the wall (my favourite was GBIF data converted to 3D plastic prints for physical data visualisation) versus a specific topic which might yield one or more tools that could, say, be integrated into the GBIF portal. But if you make it too narrow then you run the risk of getting fewer entries, which is what happened in 2017. Ironically, since the 2017 challenge I've come across work that would have made a great entry, such as a thesis by Ivelize Rocha Bernardo Promoting Interoperability of Biodiversity Spreadsheets via. Purpose Recognition, see also Bernardo, I. R., Borges, M., Baranauskas, M. C. C., & Santanchè, A. (2015). Interpretation of Construction Patterns for Biodiversity Spreadsheets. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 397–414. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22348-3_22.

This year the topic is pretty open:

The 2018 Challenge will award €34,000 for advancements in open science that feature tools and techniques that improve the access, utility or quality of GBIF-mediated data. Under this open-ended call, challenge submissions may build on existing tools and features, such as the GBIF API, Integrated Publishing Toolkit, data validator, relative species occurrence tool, among others—or develop new applications, methods, workflows or analyses.

Lots of scope, and since I'm not longer part of the GBIF Science Committee it's tempting to think about taking part. The judging criteria are pretty tough and results-oriented:

Winning entries will demonstrably extend and increase the usefulness, openness and visibility of GBIF-mediated data for identified stakeholder groups. Each submission is expected to demonstrate advantages for at least three of the following groups: researchers, policymakers, educators, students and citizen scientists.

So, maybe less scope for off-the-wall stuff, but an incentive to clearly articulate why a submission matters.

The actual submission process is, sadly, rather more opaque than in previous years where it was run in the open on Devpost where you can still see previous submissions (e.g., those for 2015). Devpost has lots of great features but isn't cheap, so the decision is understandable. Maybe some participants will keep the rest of the community informed via, say, Twitter, or perhaps people will keep things close to their chest. In any event, I hope the 2018 challenge inspires people to think about doing something both cool and useful with biodiversity data. Oh, and did I mention that a total of €34,000 in prizes is up for grabs? Deadline for submission is 5 September 2018.

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge finalists announced

The six finalists for the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge have been announced by GBIF:

“The creativity and ambition displayed by the finalists is inspiring’, said Roderic Page, chair of the Challenge jury and the GBIF Science Committee, who introduced the Challenge at GBIF’s 2014 Science Symposium in October.

“My biggest hope for the Challenge was that the biodiversity community would respond with innovative—even unexpected—entries,” Page said. “My expectations have been exceeded, and the Jury is eager to see what the finalists can achieve between now and the final round of judging.”

The finalists all receive a €1,000 prize, and now have the possibility to refine their work and compete for the grand prize of €20,000 (€5000 for second place). As the rather cheesy quote above suggests, I think the challenge has been a success in terms of the interest generated, and the quality of the entrants. While the finalists bask in glory, it's worth thinking about the future of the challenge. If it is regarded as a success, should it be run in the same way next year? The first challenge was very open in terms of scope (pretty much anything that used GBIF data), would it be better to target the challenge on a more focussed area? If so, which area needs the nost attention. Food for thought.

Steve Baskauf on RDF and the "Rod Page Challenge"

Steve Baskauf has concluded a thoughtful series of blog posts on RDF and biodiversity informatics with http://baskauf.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/confessions-of-rdf-agnostic-part-7.html. In this post he discussed the "Rod Page Challenge", which was a series of grumpy posts I wrote (starting with this one) where I claimed RDF basically sucked, and to illustrate this I issued a challenge for people to do something interesting with some RDF I provided. Since this RDF didn't have a stable home I've put it on GitHub and it has a DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20990 courtesy of GitHub's integration with Zenodo.

I argued that the RDF typically available was basically useless because it wasn't adequately linked (see Reflections on the TDWG RDF "Challenge"). Two of the RDF files I provided were created specifically created to tackle this problem (derived from my projects iPhylo Linkout http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/currents.RRN1228 and the precursor to BioNames http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.190). This marked pretty much the end of any interest I had in pursuing RDF.

Towards the end of Steve's post he writes:

At the close of my previous blog post, in addition to revisiting the Rod Page Challenge, I also promised to talk about what it would take to turn me from an RDF Agnostic into an RDF Believer. I will recap the main points about what I think it will take in order for the Rod Page Challenge to REALLY be met (i.e. for machines to make interesting inferences and provide humans with information about biodiversity that would not be obvious otherwise):

1. Resource descriptions in RDF need to be rich in triples containing object properties that link to other IRI-identified resources.
2. "Discovery" of IRI-identified resources is more likely to lead to interesting information when the linked IRIs are from Internet domains controlled by different providers.
3. Materialized entailed triples do not necessarily lead to "learning" useful things. Materialized entailed triples are useful if they allow the construction of more clever or meaningful queries, or if they state relationships that would not be obvious to humans.

Steve's point 1 is essentially the point I was making with the challenge. At the time of the challenge, RDF from major biodiversity informatics projects was in silos, with few (if any) links to external resources (the kinds of things Steve refers to in his point 2). As a result, the promised benefits from RDF simply haven't materialised. The lesson I took from this is that we need rich, dense cross-links between data sources (the "biodiversity knowledge graph"), and that's one reason I've been obsessed with populating BioNames, which links animal names to the primary literature (I'm planning to extend this to plants as well). Turns out , creating lots of cross links is really hard work, much harder than simply pumping out a bunch of RDF and waiting for it to automagically coalesce into an all-connected knowledge graph.

I posed the challenge back in 2011, and since then I think the landscape has changed to the extent that I wonder if trying to "fix" RDF is really the way forward.

XML is dead

Anyone (sane) developing for the web and wanting to move data around is using JSON, XML is hideous and best avoided. Much of the early work on RDF used XML, which only made things even harder than they already were. JSON beats XML, to the extent that RDF itself now has a JSON serialisation, JSON-LD. But JSON-LD is about more than the semantic web (see JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web), and has the great advantage that you can actually ignore all the RDF cruft (i.e., the namespaces) and simply treat the data as key-value pairs (yay!). Once you do that, then you can have fun with the data, especially with databases such as CouchDB ("fun" and "database" in the same sentence, I know!).

Key-value pairs, document stores, and graph databases

The NoSQL "movement" has thrown up all sorts of new ways to handle data and to think about databases. We can think of RDF as describing a graph, but it carries the burden of all the namespaces, vocabularies, and ontologies that come with it. Compare that with the fun (there's that word again) of graph databases such as Neo4J with its graph gists. The Neo4J folks have made a great job of publicising their approach, and making it easy and attractive to play with.

So, we're in a interesting time when there are a bunch of technologies available, and I think maybe it's time to ask whether the community's allegiance to RDF and the Semantic Web has been somewhat misplaced...

iEvoBio 2012 Challenge: Synthesizing phylogenies

The iEvoBio 2012 Challenge has been announced, and the topic is synthesizing phylogenies. The task:

Somewhere, buried in large sets of trees, lies a stunning new revelation, a baffling discovery, the answer to a longstanding controversy, or simply something not obvious to the naked eye. The mission of the 2012 iEvoBio challenge is to find those revelations, discoveries and answers within your own data and/or within one of the datasets provided by the challenge. What new scientifically interesting results can you pull from these trees, using any combination of techniques at your disposal?

The rules of this challenge are:

1. The set of trees you use must have at least 10,000 leaves in total. Acceptable entries could be a set comprising 2,500 distinct trees covering the same four taxa, a single tree with 10,000+ leaves, or anything in between.
2. Your results must be scientifically new.
3. The data, or at least a description of the data, must be publicly available. If working with your own dataset, you must at least provide a summary of the data you used (see below for the minimum description that must be provided).
4. The source code of any tool and/or method developed as part of your challenge submission must be publicly downloadable under an OSI-approved open-source license (or dedicated to the public domain) at the latest by the time of the conference.

For more details see the challenge site. Deadline for submission is June 25, 2012.

EOL Computable Data Challenge community

Now we are awash in challenges! EOL has announced its Computable Data Challenge:

We invite ideas for scientific research projects that use EOL, including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), to answer questions in biology. The specific field of biological interest for the challenge is open; projects in ecology, evolution, behavior, conservation biology, developmental biology, or systematics may be most appropriate. Projects advancing informatics alone may be less competitive. EOL may be used as a source of biological information, to establish a sampling strategy, to assist the retrieval of computable data by mapping identifiers across sources (e.g. to accomplish name resolution), and/or in other innovative ways. Projects involving data or text or image mining of EOL or BHL content are encouraged. Current EOL data and API shall be used; suggestions for modification of content or the API could be a deliverable of the project. We encourage the use of data not yet in EOL for analyses. In all cases projects must honor terms of use and licensing as appropriate.

Some $US 50,000 is on offer. "Challenge" is perhaps a misnomer, as EOL is offering this money not as a prize at the end, but rather to fund one or more proposals (submitted by 22 May) that are accepted. So, it's essentially a grant competition (with a pleasingly minimal amount of administrivia). There is also a Computable Data Challenge community to discuss the challenge.

It's great to see EOL trying different strategies to engage with developers. Of the different challenges EOL is running this one is perhaps the most appealing to me, because one of my biggest complaints about EOL is that it's hard to envisage "doing science" with it. For example, we can download GenBank and cluster sequences into gene families, or grab data from GBIF and model species distributions, but what could we do with EOL? This challenge will be a chance to explore the extent to which EOL can support science, which I would argue will be a key part of its long term future.

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge

The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is open! From the official announcement

The GBIF Secretariat has launched the inaugural GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, hoping to inspire innovative applications of open-access biodiversity data by scientists, informaticians, data modelers, cartographers and other experts.

First prize is €20,000, full details on prizes and entry requirements are on the Challenge web site. To judge the entries GBIF has assembled a panel of judges comprising people both inside and outside GBIF and its advisory committees:

 Lucas Joppa
 Scientist, Computational Ecology and Environmental Sciences Group / Microsoft Research

 Mary Klein
 President & CEO / NatureServe

 Tanya Abrahamse
 CEO / SANBI: South African National Biodiversity Institute

 Arturo H. Ariño
 Professor of Ecology / University of Navarra

 Roderic Page (that's me)
 Professor of Taxonomy / University of Glasgow

This is the first time we've run the challenge, so the topic is wide open. Below I've put together some ideas that are simply designed to get you thinking (and are in no way intended to limit the sort of things that could be entered).

Evolutionary trees
Increasingly DNA sequences from DNA barcoding and metabarcoding are being used to study biodiversity. How can we integrate that data into GBIF? Can we decorate GBIF maps with evolutionary trees?

Change over timeGlobal Forest Watch is an impressive example of how change in the biosphere can be monitored over time. Can we do something similar with GBIF data? Alternatively, if the level of temporal or spatial resolution in GBIF data isn't high enough, can we combine these sources in some way?

Dashboard
GBIF has started to provide
graphical summaries of its data, and there is lots to be done in this area. Can we have a Google Analytics-style summary of GBIF data?

This merely scratches the surface of what could be done, and indeed one of the reasons for having the challenge is to start a conversation about what can be done with half a billion data records.

GBIF Challenge Entry: Ozymandias

I've submitted an entry for the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. It's a couple of weeks before the deadline but I will be away then so have decided to submit early.

My entry is Ozymandias - a biodiversity knowledge graph. The name is a play on "Oz" being nickname for Australia (much of the data for the entry comes from Australia), and Ozymandias, which is a poem about hubris, and attempting to link biodiversity data requires a certain degree of hubris.

The submission process for the challenge is unfortunately rather opaque compared to previous years when entries were visible to all, so participants could see what other people were submitting, and also knew the identity of the judges, etc. In the spirit of openness here is my video summarising my entry:

Ozymandias - GBIF Challenge Entry from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

There is also a background document here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UglxaL-yjXsvgwn06AdBbnq-HaT7mO4H5WXejzsb9MY/edit?usp=sharing.

I suspect this entry is not at all what the challenge is looking for, but I've used the challenge as a deadline so that I get something out the door rather than endlessly tweaking a project that only I can see. There will, of course, be endless tweaking as I explore further ways to link data, but at least this way there is something people can look at. Now, I need to spend some time writing up the project, which will require yet more self discipline to avoid the endless tweaking.

GBIF Challenge 2017: Liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse

GBIF is running its Ebbe Nielsen Challenge for the third successive year. This year the title is Liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse. To quote from the Challenge background on Devpost:

This year's Challenge will seek to leverage the growth of open data policies among scientific journals and research funders, which require researchers to make the data underlying their findings publicly available. Adoption of these policies represents an important first step toward increasing openness, transparency and reproducibility across all scientific domains, including biodiversity-related research.

To abide by these requirements, researchers often deposit datasets in public open-access repositories. Potential users are then able to find and access the data through repositories as well as data aggregators like OpenAIRE and DataONE. Many of these datasets are already structured in tables that contain the basic elements of biodiversity information needed to build species occurrence records: scientific names, dates, and geographic locations, among others.

However, the practices adopted by most repositories, funders and journals do not yet encourage the use of standardized formats. This approach significantly limits the interoperability and reuse of these datasets. As a result, the wider reuse of data implied if not stated by many open data policies falls short, even in cases where open licensing designations (like those provided through Creative Commons) seem to encourage it.

In essence, the 2017 Challenge is to develop tools to discover these biodiversity-relevant datasets, and make them available to GBIF. In other words, we want tools to enable us to do this:

As an example of the impact that external data can have on GBIF, last year I wrote a blog post (The Zika virus, GBIF, and the missing mosquitoes) describing how I took published data (doi:10.1038/sdata.2015.35) from the Dryad repository and added it to GBIF. The effect was dramatic:

Before

After

This is just one example. I suspect that there is a lot of biodiversity data gathering digital dust sitting in repositories that could be more widely reused if we just had the tools to discover it, and convert it into a form that GBIF can use. Prove me right, and win cash prizes! Details at https://gbif2017.devpost.com.

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge update

🎉 🎉 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.

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge submissions: judging begins

The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has closed and we have 23 submissions for the jury to evaluate. There's quite a range of project types (and media, including sound and physical objects), and it's going to be fascinating to evaluate all the entries (some of which are shown below). This is the first time GBIF has run this challenge, so it's gratifying to see so much creativity in response to the challenge. While judging itself is limited to the jury (of which I'm a member), I'd encourage anyone interested in biodiversity informatics to browse the submissions. Although you can't leave comments directly on the submissions within the GBIF Challenge pages, each submission also appears on the portfolio page of the person/organisation that created the entry, so you can leave comments there (follow the link at the bottom of the page for each submission to see it on the portfolio page).

Suggested apps for BHL's Life and Literature Code Challenge

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge. In part this post has been inspired by the Results of the PLoS and Mendeley "Call for Apps", where PLoS and Mendeley asked for people (not necessarily developers) to suggest the kind of apps they'd like to see. As an aside, one thing conspicuous by it's absence is a prize for winning the challenge. PLoS and Mendeley have a "API Binary Battle" with a prize of $US 10,001, which seems more likely to inspire people to take part.

Visual search engine
I suspect that many BHL users are looking for illustrations (exemplified by the images being gathered in BHL's Flickr group). One way to search for images would be to search within the OCR text for figure and plate captions, such as "Fig. 1". Indexing these captions by taxonomic name would provide a simple image search tool. For modern publications most figures are on the same page as the caption, but for older publications with illustrations as plates, the caption and corresponding image may be separated (e.g., on facing pages), so the search results might need to show pages around the page containing the caption. As an aside, it's a pity the Flickr images only link to the BHL item and not the BHL page. If they did the later, and the images were tagged with what they depict, you could great a visual search engine using the Flickr API (of course, this might be just the way to implement the visual search engine — harvest images, tags with PageID and taxon names, upload to Flickr).

Mobile interface
The BHL web site doesn't look great on an iPhone. It makes no concessions to the mobile device, and there are some weird things such as the way the list of pages is rendered. A number of mainstream science publishers are exploring mobile versions of their web sites, for example Taylor and Francis have a jQuery Mobile powered interface for mobile users. I've explored iPad interfaces to scientific articles in previous posts. BHL content posses some challenges, but is fundamentally the same as viewing PDFs — you have fixed pages that you may want to zoom.

OCR correction
There is a lot of scope for cleaning up the OCR text in BHL. Part of the trick would be to have a simple use interface for people to contribute to this task. In an earlier post I discussed a Firefox hOCR add-on that provides a nice way to do this. Take this as a starting point, add a way to save the cleaned up text, and you'd be well on the way to making a useful tool.

Taxon name timeline
Despite the shiny new interface, the Encyclopedia of Life still displays BHL literature in the same clunky way I described in an earlier blog post. It would great to have a timeline of the usage of a name, especially if you could compare the usage of different names (such as synonyms). In many ways this is the BHL equivalent Google Books Ngram viewer.

These are just a few hastily put together thoughts. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, feel free to add them as comments below.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge

The Encyclopedia of Life have announced the EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. The contest has two purposes:

It provides a testbed for the Evolutionary Informatics community to develop robust methods for producing, serving, and evaluating large, biologically meaningful trees that will be useful both to the research community and to broader audiences.

It enables the Encyclopedia of Life to organise the information it aggregates according to phylogenetic relationships; in other words, it provides a direct pipeline from research results to practical use.

First prize is a trip to iEvoBio 2012, this year in Ottawa, Canada. For more details visit the challenge website. There is also an EOL community devoted to this challenge.

Challenges are great things, especially ones with worthwhile tasks and decent prizes. EOL badly needs a phylogenetic perspective, so this is a welcome development.

But (there's always a but), I can't help feeling that we need something a little more radical. The tree of life isn't a tree. At deep levels it's a forest, and even at shallow levels things are a complicated tangle of gene trees. Sometimes the tree is clear, sometimes not, and some of this is real and some reflects our ignorance.

If you want a simple tree to navigate, then I'd argue that the NCBI tree is a pretty good start, and EOL already has this. What would be really cool is to have a way to navigate that makes it clear that phylogenetic knowledge has a degree of uncertainty, and that the "tree of life" might be better depicted as a set of overlapping trees. The mental image I have is of a collage of trees from different data sets, superimposed over each other, with perhaps an underlying consensus to help navigate. This visualisation could be zoomable, because in some ways the tree of life is fractal. Trees don't stop at species, as the wealth of barcoding and phylogeographic studies show. Given computational constraints (not to mention visualisation issues), I wonder whether there is an effective limit to the size of any one tree in terms of number of taxa. What varies is the taxonomic scope. So we could imagine a backbone tree based on slowly evolving genes, we zoom in and more trees appear, but at lower levels, and finally we hit populations and individuals, trees that may have 100's of samples, but a very narrow scope.

This is all rather poorly articulated, but I can't help wondering whether a phylogenetic classification will end up distorting the very thing we're trying to depict. It also looses connection with the underlying data (and trees), which for me is a huge drawback of existing classifications. There's no sense of why they are the way they are. There's a chance here to bring together ideas that have been kicking around in the phylogenetic community for a couple of decades and rethink how we navigate the "tree of life".

e-Biosphere 09 Challenge slides

I've put the slides for my e-Biosphere 09 challenge entry on SlideShare.

e-Biosphere '09 Challenge

View more OpenOffice presentations from rdmpage.

Not much information on the other entries yet, except for the eBiosphere Citizen Science Challenge, by Joel Sachs and colleagues, which will demonstrate a "global human sensor net". Their plan is to aggregate observations posted on Flickr, Twitter, Spotter, and email. It might be fun to make use of some of this for my own entry (by default already will, because we are both using EOL's Flickr pool).

Final thoughts on TDWG RDF challenge

Quick final comment on the TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?. As I noted in the previous post, Olivier Rovellotti (@orovellotti) and Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) have produced some nice visualisations of the frog data set:

Nice as these are, I can't help feeling that they actually help make my point about the current state of RDF in biodiversity informatics. The only responses to my challenge have been to use geography, where the shared coordinate system (latitude and longitude) facilitates integration. Having geographic coordinates means we don't need to have shared identifiers to do something useful, and I think it's no accident that GBIF is one of the most important resources we have. Geography is also the easiest way to integrate across other fields (e.g., climate).

But what of the other dimensions? What I'm really after are links across datasets that enable us to make new inferences, or address interesting questions. The challenge is still there...

GBIF 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge entries

The GBIF 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has received 15 submissions. You can view them here: Unlike last year where the topic was completely open, for the second challenge we've narrowed the focus to "Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data". As with last year, judging is limited to the jury (of which I'm a member), however anyone interested in biodiversity informatics can browse the submissions. Although you can't leave comments directly on the submissions within the GBIF Challenge pages, each submission also appears on the portfolio page of the person/organisation that created the entry, so you can leave comments there (follow the link at the bottom of the page for each submission to see it on the portfolio page).

GBIF Challenge: €31,000 in prizes for analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data

In a classic paper Boggs (1949) appealed for an “atlas of ignorance”, an honest assessment of what we know we don’t know:

Boggs, S. W.. (1949). An Atlas of Ignorance: A Needed Stimulus to Honest Thinking and Hard Work. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 93(3), 253–258. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3143475

This is the theme of this year's GBIF Challenge: Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data. "Gaps" can be gaps in geographic coverage, taxa group, or types of data. GBIF is looking for ways to access the nature of the gaps in the data it is aggregating from its network of contributors.

How to enter

Details on how to enter are on the Challenge website, deadline is September 30th.

Ideas

One approach to gap analysis is to compare what we expect to see with what we actually have. For example, we might take a “well-known” group of organisms and use that to benchmark GBIF’s data coverage. A drawback is that the “well-known” organisms tend to be the usual suspects (birds, mammals, fish, etc.), and there is the issue of whether the chosen group is a useful proxy for other taxa. Another approach is to base the estimate of ignorance on the data itself. For example, OBIS has computed Hurlbert's index of biodiversity for its database, e.g. http://data.unep-wcmc.org/datasets/16 Can we scale these methods to the 600+ million records in GBIF? There are some clever methods for using resampling methods (such as the bootstrap) on large data sets that might be relevant, see http://www.unofficialgoogledatascience.com/2015/08/an-introduction-to-poisson-bootstrap_26.html.

Another approach might be to compare different datasets for the same taxa, particularly if one data set is not in GBIF. Or perhaps we can compare datasets for the same taxa collected by different methods.

Or we could look at taxonomic gaps. In an earlier post The Zika virus, GBIF, and the missing mosquitoes I noted that GBIF's coverage of vectors of the Zika virus was very poor. How well does GBIF cover vectors and other organisms relevant to human health? Maybe we could generalise this to explore other taxa. It might, for example, be interesting to compare degree of coverage for a species with some measure of the "importance" of that species. Measures of importance could be based on, say, number of hits in Google Scholar for that species, size of Wikipedia page (see Wikipedia mammals and the power law), etc.

Gaps might also be gaps in data completeness, quality, or type.

Summary

This post has barely scratched the surface of what is possible. But I think one important thing to bear in mind is that the best analyses of gaps are those that lead to "actionable insights", in other words, if you are going to enter the challenge (and please do, it's free to enter and there's money to be won), how does you entry help GBIF and the wider biodiversity community decide what to do about gaps?

GBIF Challenge success

Somewhat stunned by the fact that my DNA barcode browser I described earlier was one of the (minor) prizewinners in this year's GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. For details on the winner and other place getters see ShinyBIOMOD wins 2020 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge. Obviously I'm biased, but it's nice to see the challenge inspiring creativity in biodiversity informatics. Congratulations to everyone who took part.

My entry is live at https://dna-barcode-browser.herokuapp.com. I had a difficult time keeping it online over the summer due to meow attacks, but managed to sort that out. Turns out the cloud provider I used to host Elasticsearch switched from securing the server by default to making it completely open to anyone, and I'd missed that change.

Given that the project was a success, I'm tempted to revisit it and explore further ways to combine phylogenetic trees in a biodiversity browser.

TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?

Last month, feeling particularly grumpy, I fired off an email to the TDWG-TAG mailing list with the subject Lobbing grenades: a challenge. Here's the email:

It's morning and the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet, but reading through recent TDWG TAG posts, and mindful of the upcoming meeting in New Orleans (which sadly I won't be attending) I'm seeing a mismatch between the amount of effort being expended on discussions of vocabularies, ontologies, etc. and the concrete results we can point to.

Hence, a challenge:

"What new things have we learnt about biodiversity by converting biodiversity data into RDF?"

I'm not saying we can't learn new things, I'm simply asking what have we learnt so far?

Since around 2006 we have had literally millions of triples in the wild (uBio, ION, Index Fungorum, IPNI, Catalogue of Life, more recently Biodiversity Collections Index, Atlas of Living Australia, World Register of Marine Species, etc.), most of these using the same vocabulary. What new inferences have we made?

Let's make the challenge more concrete. Load all these data sources into a triple store (subchallenge - is this actually possible?). Perhaps add other RDF sources (DBpedia, Bio2RDF, CrossRef). What novel inferences can we make?

I may, of course, simply be in "grumpy old arse" mode, but we have millions of triples in the wild and nothing to show for it. I hope I'm not alone in wondering why...

In the context of the TDWG meeting (happening as we speak and which I'm following via Twitter, hashtag #tdwg) Joel Sachs asked me whether I had any specific data in mind that could form the basis of a discussion. So, here goes. I've assembled some small RDF data sets that it might be fun to play with. Each data set is for frogs, and I've divided them into two sets.

Primary data
These data sets are essentially unmodified RDF fetched from data providers:

• uniprot.rdf Uniprot RDF for frogs in GenBank
• ion.rdf Index of Organism Names (ION) RDF for taxonomic names for frogs (filtered to just those names that are also in GenBank, the RDF comes from ION LSIDs)
• crossref.rdf CrossRef RDF for DOIs for publications that published new frog names (obtaining using CrossRef's support for Linked Data for DOIs)
• dbpedia.rdf Dbpedia RDF for frogs in GenBank (Update 2011-10-20: the dbpedia.rdf file is a bit big, so here is subset.rdf which has just the conservation status and thumbnail image)

These sources give us information on genomics (at least, they tell us which taxa have been sequenced), where and when the original taxonomic description was published, and by whom, as well as some information on conservation status and what the frog looks like (via Dbpedia). Ideally we just load these files into a triple store and then ask a bunch of questions, such as what is the conservation status of frogs sequenced in Genbank?, is there correlation between the conservation status of a frog and the date it was discovered?, who has described the most frog species?, etc.

My contention is that actually we can't do any of this because the data is siloed due to the lack of shared identifiers and vocabularies (I suspect that there is not a single identifier any of these files share). The only way we can currently link these data sets together is by shared string literals (e.g., taxonomic names), in which case why bother with RDF? So my first challenge is to see whether any of the questions I've just listed can actually be tackled using this data.

Glue
In a slightly more constructive mode, to see if we can make progress I'm providing some additional RDF files, based on projects I'm working on to link data together. These files may help provide some of the missing "glue" to connect these data sets.

• linkout.rdf The list of links between NCBI and Dbpedia (based on mapping in iPhylo LinkOut)
• ion_doi.rdf A subset of publications listed in ION have DOIs, this file links the corresponding ION LSIDs to those DOIs (this file is from an ongoing project mapping names to primary literature)

The first file links the ION and CrossRef RDF, so we could start to ask questions about dates of discovery, who described what species, etc.. The second file links NCBI taxon ids (in this case in the form of UniProt URIs) to Wikipedia (in the form of Dbpedia URIs). Dbpedia has information on conservation status, and some frogs will also have pictures, so we can start to join genomics to conservation, as well as make some visualisations.

Update
I've now added another RDF file for 1000 georeferenced GenBank sequences for frogs. The file is genbank.rdf. This file is generated from a local, processed version of EMBL, and uses a mixture of Dublin Core and TDWG vocabularies. Here's an example of a single record:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" 
xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" 
xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#" 
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" 
xmlns:tcommon="http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Common#" 
xmlns:toccurrence="http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence#" 
xmlns:uniprot="http://purl.uniprot.org/core/">
  <uniprot:Molecule rdf:about="http://bio2rdf.org/genbank:EU566842">
    <dcterms:created>2008-07-06</dcterms:created>
    <dcterms:modified>2010-12-23</dcterms:modified>
    <dcterms:title>EU566842</dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:description>Xenopus borealis voucher MHNG:Herp:2644.64 
cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, partial cds; mitochondrial.</dcterms:description>
    <dcterms:subject rdf:resource="http://purl.uniprot.org/taxonomy/8354"/>
    <dcterms:relation rdf:parseType="Resource">
      <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonOccurrence#TaxonOccurrence"/>
      <toccurrence:identifiedToString>Xenopus borealis</toccurrence:identifiedToString>
      <toccurrence:decimalLatitude>0.66</toccurrence:decimalLatitude>
      <geo:lat>0.66</geo:lat>
      <toccurrence:decimalLongitude>37.5</toccurrence:decimalLongitude>
      <geo:long>37.5</geo:long>
      <toccurrence:verbatimCoordinates>0.66 N 37.5 E</toccurrence:verbatimCoordinates>
      <toccurrence:country>Kenya</toccurrence:country>
      <dcterms:identifier>MHNG:Herp:2644.64</dcterms:identifier>
    </dcterms:relation>
  </uniprot:Molecule>
</rdf:RDF>

I've added this simply so one could do some geographical queries.

Missing links
There are still lots of missing links here (for example, there's no explicit link between NCBI and ION, so we'd need to create this using taxonomic names), and we could add further links to the literature via sequences for taxa. Then there's the lack of geographic data. We could get some of this via georeferenced sequences in GenBank, but there's no RDF for this (Bio2RDF does have RDF for sequences but it ignores the bulk of the organismal metadata such as voucher specimens and latitude and longitude).

In many ways it's this lack of links that was point of my original email. The reality is that "linked data" isn't linked to anything like the extent that makes it useful. Simply pumping out RDF won't get us very far until we tackle this problem (see also my earlier post Linked data that isn't: the failings of RDF).

So, if you think RDF is the way to go, please tell me what you can learn from these data files.

Towards a biodiversity token: Bitcoin, FinTech, and a radical suggestion for the GBIF Challenge

First off, let me say that what follows is a lot of arm waving to try and obscure how little I understand what I'm talking about. I'm going to sketch out what I think is a "radical" idea for a GBIF Challenge entry.

TL;DR GBIF should issue it's own cryptocurrency and use that to fund the development of the GBIF network by charging for downloading cleaned, processed data (original provider data remains free). People can buy subscriptions to get access to data, and/or purchase GBIF currency as a contribution or investment. Proceeds from the purchase of cleaned data are divided between GBIF (to fund the portal), the data providers (to reward them making data available) and the GBIF nodes in countries included in the geographic coverage of the data (to help them build their biodiversity infrastructure). The challenge entry would involve modelling this idea and conducting simulations to test it's efficacy.

The motivation for this idea comes from several sources:

1. GBIF is (under-)funded by direct contributions from governments, hence each year it essentially "begs" for money. Several rich countries (such as the United Kingdom) struggle to pay the fairly paltry sums involved. Part of the problem is that they are taking something of demonstrable value (money) and giving it to an organisation (GBIF) which has no demonstrable financial value. Hence the argument for funding GBIF is basically "it's the right thing to do". This is not really a tenable or sustainable model.

2. Many web sites provide information for "free" in that the visitor doesn't pay any money. Instead the visitor views ads and, whether they are aware if it or not, are handing over large amounts of data about themselves and their behaviour (think the recent scandal involving Facebook).

3. Some people are rebelling against the "free with ads" by seeking other ways to fund the web. For example, the Brave web browser enables you to buy BATS (Basic Attention Tokens, based on Ethereum). You can choose to send BATS to web sites that you visit (and hence find valuable). Those sites don't need to harvest tyour data or bombard you with ads to receive an income.

4. Cryptocurrency is being widely explored as a way to raise funding for new ventures. Many of these are tech-based, but there are some interesting developments in conservation and climate change, such as Veridium which offsets carbon emissions. There are links between efforts like Veridium and carbon offset programmes such as the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve, so you can go from cryptocurrency to trees.

5. The rather ugly, somewhat patronising furore that erupted when Rwanda decided that the best way to increase its foreign currency earnings (as a step towards ultimately freeing itself from dependency on development aid) was to sign a sponsorship deal with Arsenal football club.

Now, imagine a situation where GBIF has a cryptocurrency token (e.g., the "GBIF coin"). Anyone, whether a country, an organisation, or an individual can buy GBIF coins. If you want to download GBIF data, you will need to pay in GBIF coins, either per-download or via a monthly subscription. The proceeds from each download are split in a way that supports the GBIF network as a whole. For example, imagine GBIF itself gets 30% (like Apple's App Store). The remaining 70% gets' split between (a) the data providers and (b) the GBIF nodes in countries included in the data download. For example, almost all the data on a country such as Rwanda does not come from Rwanda itself, but from other countries. You want to reward anyone who makes data available, but you also want to support the development of a biodiversity data infrastructure in Rwanda (or any other country), so part of the proceeds go to the GBIF node in Rwanda.

Now, an immediate issue (apart from the merits or otherwise of blockchains and cryptocurrency) is that I'm advocating charging for access to data, which seems antithetical to open access. To be clear, I think open access is crucial. I'm suggesting that we distinguish between two classes of data. The first is the data as it is provided to GBIF. That is almost always open data under a CC0 license, and that remains free. But if you ant it for free it is served as it is received. In other words, for free access to data GBIF is essentially a dumb repository (like, say, Dryad). The data is there, you can search the metadata for each dataset, so essentially you get something like the current dataset search.

The other thing GBIF does is that it processes the data, cleaning it, reconciling names and locations, and indexing it, so that if you want to search for a given species, GBIF summarises the data across all the datasets and (often) presents you with a better result that if you'd downloaded all the original data and simply merged it together yourself. This is a valuable service, and its one of the reasons why GBIF costs money to run. So imagine that we do something like this:

1. It is free to browse GBIF as a person and explore the data
2. It is free to download the raw data provided by any data publisher.
3. It costs to download cleaned data that corresponds to a specific query, e.g. all records for a particular taxon, geographic area, etc.
4. Payment for access to cleaned data is via the GBIF coin.
5. The cost is small, on the scale of buying a music track or subscribing to Spotify.

Now, I don't expect GBIF to embrace this idea anytime soon. By nature it's a conservative, risk-averse organisation. But I think something like this idea deserves serious attention, ideally from people with much better understanding of the issues that my own "I saw this on Twitter therefore it must be cool" level. One way to move forward would be to model how such a system would work, based for example on data on web site visits and data downloads on the current GBIF portal. I suspect models could be built to give some idea of whether such an approach would be financially viable. It occurs to me that something like this would make a great GBIF Challenge entry, particularly as it is gives a license for thinking the unthinkable with no risk to GBIF itself.

e-Biosphere Challenge

The e-Biosphere meeting in London June 1-3 has announced a The e-Biosphere 09 Informatics Challenge:

Prepare and present a real-time demonstration during the days of the Conference of the capabilities in your community of practice to discover, disseminate, integrate, and explore new biodiversity-related data by:

• Capturing data in private and public databases
• Conducting quality assurance on the data by automated validation and/or peer review
• Indexing, linking and/or automatically submitting the new data records to other relevant databases
• Integrating the data with other databases and data streams
• Making these data available to relevant audiences
• Make the data and links to the data widely accessible and
• Offering interfaces for users to query or explore the data.

The "real time" aspect of the challenge seems a bit forced. I think they originally wanted a "live demo", but now they seem to be happy with a demo that unfolds over the three day meeting, without necessarily literally taking three days (what the organisers term "cooking shows"). I also think cash prizes would have been a good idea (the web site simply says "there will be prizes"). It's not the cash itself that matters, it's the fact that it indicates that the organisers are serious about wanting to attract entries. Entrants are likely to invest more time than they'd recoup in cash.

In any event, given that challenges are a great way to focus the mind on a deadline, I'll be entering the wiki of taxonomic names that I've been working on.