Today I managed to publish some data from a GitHub repository directly to GBIF. Within a few minutes (and with Tim Robertson on hand via Skype to debug a few glitches) the data was automatically indexed by GBIF and its maps updated. You can see the data I uploaded here.
The data I uploaded came from this paper:
Shapiro, L. H., Strazanac, J. S., & Roderick, G. K. (2006, October). Molecular phylogeny of Banza (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae), the endemic katydids of the Hawaiian Archipelago. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Elsevier BV. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.04.006This is the data I used to build the geophylogeny for Banza using Google Earth. Prior to uploading this data, GBIF had no georeferenced localities for these katydids, now it has 21 occurrences:
How it worksI give details of how I did this in the GitHub repository for the data. In brief, I took data from the appendix in the Shapiro et al. paper and created a Darwin Core Archive in a repository in GitHub. Mostly this involved messing with Excel to format the data. I used GBIF's registry API to create a dataset record, pointed it at the GitHub repository, and let GBIF do the rest. There were a few little hiccups, such as needing to tweak the meta.xml file that describes the data, and GBIF's assumption that specimens are identified by the infamous "Darwin Core Triplet" meant I had to invent one for each occurrence, but other than that it was pretty straightforward.
I've talked about using GitHub to help clean up Darwin Core Archives from GBIF, and VertNet are using GitHub as an issue tracker, but what I've done here differs in one crucial way. I'm not just grabbing a file from GBIF and showing that it is broken (with no way to get those fixes to GBIF), nor am I posting bug reports for data hosted elsewhere and hoping that someone will fix it (like VertNet), what I'm doing here is putting data on GitHub and having GBIF harvest that data directly from GitHub. This means I can edit the data, rebuild the Darwin Core Archive file, push it to GitHub, and GBIF will reindex it and update the data on the GBIF portal.
Beyond nodes
GBIF's default publishing model is a federated one. Data providers in countries (such as museums and herbaria) digitise their data and make it available to national aggregators ("nodes"), which typically host a portal with information about the biodiversity of that nation (the Atlas of Living Australia is perhaps the most impressive example). These nodes then make the data available to GBIF, which provides a global portal to the world's biodiversity data (as opposed to national-level access provided by nodes).
This works well if you assume that most biodiversity data is held by national natural history collections, but this is debatable. There are other projects, some of them large and not necessarily "national" that have valuable data. These projects can join GBIF and publish their data. But what about all the data that is held in other databases (perhaps not conventionally thought of as biodiversity databases), or the huge amount of information in the published literature. How does that get into GBIF? People like me who data mine the literature for information on specimens and localities, such as this map of localities mentioned in articles in BioStor. How do we get that data into GBIF?
Data publishingBeing able to publish data directly to GBIF makes putting the effort into publishing data seem less onerous, because I can see it appear in GBIF within minutes. Putting 21 records of katydids is clearly a drop in the ocean, but there is potentially vastly more data waiting to be mined. managing the data on GitHub also makes the whole process of data cleaning and edit transparent. As ever, there are a couple of things that still need to be tackled.
It's who you know
I've been able to do this because I have links with GBIF, and they have made the (hopefully reasonable) assumption that I'm not going to publish just any old crap to GBIF. I still had to get "endorsed" by the UK node (being the chair of the GBIF Science Committee probably helped), and I'm lucky that Tim Roberston was online at the time and guided me through the process. None of this is terribly scalable. It would be nice if we had a way to open up GBIF to direct publishing, but also with a review process built in (even if it's a post-review so that data may have to be pulled if it becomes clear it's problematic). Perhaps this could be managed via GitHub, for example data could be uploaded and managed there, and GBIF can then choose to pull that repository and the data would appear on GBIF. Another model is something like the Biodiversity Data Journal, but that doesn't (as far as I know) have a direct feed into GBIF.
Whichever approach we take, we need a simple, frictionless way to get data into GBIF, especially if we want to tackle the obvious geographic and taxonomic biases in the data GBIF currently has.
DOIs please
It would be great if I could get a DOI for this data set. I had toyed with putting it on Figshare which would give me a DOI, but that just puts an additional layer between GitHub and GBIF. Ideally instead (or as well as) the UUID I get from GBIF to identify the dataset, I'd get a DOI that others can cite, and which would appear on my ORCID profile. I'd also want a way to link the data DOI to the DOI for the source paper (doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.04.006), so that citations of the data can pass some of that "link love" to the original authors. So, GBIF needs to mint DOIs for datasets.
Summary
The ability to upload data to GitHub and then have that harvested by GBIF is really exciting. We get great tools for managing changes in data, with a simple publication process (OK, simple if you know Tim, and can speak REST to the GBIF API). But we are getting closer to easy publishing and, just as importantly, easy editing and correcting data.
