1. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Scratchpads for community involvement for natural history collections Dr Dimitris Koureas Biodiversity Informatics Group | Department of Life Sciences Natural History Museum London Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 | Tucson, AZ

2. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Inaccessible | native format/private silos Disconnected | not aggregated or discoverable Redundant | overlapping efforts no coordination Cluttered | small and dispersed datasets 20% 80% The long tail of Biodiversity data What is we try to tackle? Typically produced by small communities

3. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Virtual Research Environments efficient in incentivising and enabling researchers to mobilise their data Online collaborative environments “Our goal is to make every researcher digital” Can VREs help? Underlying technologies that help semantically enrich and aggregate data on a higher level Provide efficient tools, simple interfaces and comprehensive documentation Incentivise researchers to enter, share and finally mobilise their datasets

4. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Enter – Structure – Curate – Link – Publish Biodiversity data online 7 years of continuing development | 3 major Grants | Industry leading platform

5. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ 65,000 unique visitors/month Per month unique visitors to Scratchpads sites 660 Scratchpads Communities by 7,100 active registered users covering 90,000 taxa in 615,000 pages. In total more than 1,600,000 visitors

6. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Taxa (Classifications, taxon profiles, specimens, literature, images, maps, phenotypic, genotypic & morphometric datasets, keys, phylogenies) Projects Conservation RegionsSocieties

7. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ A Scratchpad is a gateway to big data In-house data External data & services Biodiversity standards (TDWG, DwC, Audubon)

8. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Mark-up / Data annotation Atomisation Collaborate Curate Link Source data Aggregate Publish Unstructured Overlapping Disconnected Native formats & vocabularies Controlled vocabularies are key for efficient data capture

9. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ In order to capture and annotate data we need Fine grained pre-defined fields and Comprehensive controlled vocabularies 1. 2.

10. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Capturing specimen record data Taxonomic identification Date Collector Location -Continent -Country -State/Province -GPS -Locality - Area/place - Habitat - Substrate (Environmental material) - biome Usually transcribed from label Some inferred by curators Provided in highly inconsistent way EOL IUCN ISO web service DwC What we currently use Generating character/trait projects Morphological/anatomical characters Ecological traits 1.2.

11. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Users of Virtual Research Environments consumers as well as contributors to ontologies Biodiversity communities Communities working on ontologies Bottom-up approach Top-down approach

12. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Community involvement Ontology granularity Top-down approach Bottom-up approach High level approach Deep hierarchy End-user community involvement

13. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Simple and intuitive end-user products Controlled vocabularies over highly structured ontologies for data capture Mechanisms for updating vocabularies based on user custom entries 1. 2. 3.

14. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Ontologies as Infrastructure Communal / agreed Persistent Essential Robust & reliable Ontologies as Research Concerns specific communities Experimentation Frequent changes Before we can widely implement the use of ontologies we need to shift from one to another Good for Knowledge representation and reasoning Good for Data capturing

15. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Vertical approach Horizontal approach The e-infrastructures pyramid

16. Fourth Annual Summit | Feb 21-23 2014 | Tucson, AZ Thank you Comments/questions? @DimitrisKoureas d.koureas@nhm.ac.uk