Thursday, October 25, 2018

Taxonomic publications as patch files and the notion of taxonomic concepts

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There's a slow-burning discussion on taxonomic concepts on Github that I am half participating in. As seems inevitable in any discussio...
Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Specimens, collections, researchers, and publications: towards social and citation graphs for natural history collections

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Being in Ottawa last week for a hackathon meant I could catch up with David Shorthouse ( @dpsSpiders . David has been doing some neat wor...

Ottawa Ecobiomics hackathon: graph databases and Wikidata

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I spent last week in Ottawa at a "Ecobiomics" hackathon organised by Joel Sachs. Essentially we spent a week exploring the applic...

GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge update

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🎉 🎉 CONGRATULATIONS to @UofGlasgow 's @rdmpage for winning joint first prize in the 2018 @GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge, the annual in...
Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Guest post - Quality paralysis: a biodiversity data disease

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The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov . In 2005, GBIF released Arthur Chapman's Principles of Data Quality and Principles and M...
Monday, August 20, 2018

GBIF Challenge Entry: Ozymandias

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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 the...
Friday, August 17, 2018

Ozymandias demo

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I've made a video walkthrough of Ozymandias , which I described in this post . It's a bit, um, long, so I'll need to come up wit...
Friday, August 10, 2018

Ozymandias: a biodiversity knowledge graph of Australian taxa and taxonomic publications

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In the spirit of release early and release often, here is the first workable version of a biodiversity knowledge graph that I've been wo...
Friday, July 20, 2018

Signals from Singapore: NGS barcoding, generous interfaces, the return of faunas, and taxonomic burden

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Earlier this year I stopped over in Singapore, home of the spectacular "supertrees" in the Garden by the Bay . The trip was a hol...
Thursday, July 05, 2018

GBIF at 1 billion - what's next?

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How to cite: Page, R. (2018). GBIF at 1 billion - what's next? https://doi.org/10.59350/d8dwz-3v524 GBIF has reached 1 billion occurre...
Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Liberating links between datasets using lightweight data publishing: an example using IPNI and the taxonomic literature

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I've written a short paper entitled "Liberating links between datasets using lightweight data publishing: an example using plant n...
Monday, June 04, 2018

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

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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'...
Wednesday, May 09, 2018

World Taxonomists and Systematists via ORCID

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David Shorthouse ( @dpsspiders ) makes some very cool things, and his latest project World Taxonomists & Systematists is a great exampl...

2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge now open

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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 laun...

iSpecies meets Lifemap

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It's been a little quiet on this blog as I've been teaching, and spending a lot of time data wrangling and trying to get my head aro...
Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Guest post: The Not problem

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The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov . Nico Franz and Beckett Sterner created a stir last year with a preprint in bioRxiv about ...
Monday, December 11, 2017

Towards a digital natural history museum

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These notes are the result of a few events I've been involved in the last couple of months, including TDWG 2017 in Ottawa, a thesis def...
Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Blue Planet II, the BBC, and the Semantic Web: a tale of lessons forgotten and opportunities lost

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David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the...