The way forward is bottom-up participation in biological data
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Entomological Society of Canada, 2011, Halifax. Biological Survey of Canada Symposium.
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- 6. NAMES ARE THE KEY TO THE BIG NEW BIOLOGY: A BOTTOM-UP SOLUTION TO CREATING A MACROSCOPE David P. Shorthouse (dshorthouse@mbl.edu) Dmitry Mozzherin David J. Patterson The Marine Biological Laboratory Center for Library & Informatics
- 7. TREE 25(12): 686-691 doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004
- 8. David J. Patterson Dmitry Mozzherin
- 9. eol.org lifedesks.org globalnames.org gnite.org dataconservancy.org
- 20. http://gnite.org
- 25. REUSABLE
- 39. WHO WANTS TO CHAMPION?
Editor's Notes
- Clearly, anything the Biological Survey of Canada does MUST be online.
- But, getting online does not mean what it did merely 5 years ago. It MUST have a purpose, a vision, a goal, a clearly understood tag line, direction, and more importantly, a distinct presence. It also means sharing its ware as widely as possible being clear about what you want to do, where you might need help, and being a good citizen in helping others realize their visions.
- Getting online today means producing content that can be reused in ways that you did not imagine were possible and to showcase these efforts as a way to bolster enthusiasm. This message is equally important to the incumbent Editor in Chief for the Canadian Entomologist. Gone are the days of producing PDF reprints behind paywalls as a primary stream of revenue. The game is now all about Semanticizing the content, making it accessible via Application Programming Interfaces for 3 rd party access. Open the pipes as widely as you can using widely accepted techniques and let others use what you have.
- Gone are the days of putting content online in flat HTML, having it indexed by Google and declaring it a success. That was last decade. Being online today means distributing your content, engaging your audience, taking advantage of social networking opportunities, encouraging others to help get the word out. Being online today means you are prepared to slough your web page presence with a new skin to re-present your core business under a new light to meet the needs of stakeholders.
- Politically-charged question that only the BSC Board of Directors can answer as it weighs all its options. What we CAN say with certainty is that if it doesn’t make significant steps in this ‘Big New Biology’ of being online, being purposeful, producing re-usable content, engaging its audience, it will be exceptionally difficult to maintain any sustainability model.
- The BSC CAN be a player in this space. It will not be without effort, but steps toward the light can be incremental and organized. What’s working to immense advantage are its wealth of publications. Key integrators in the information age for Biology are: Geography Time Scientific Names
- GNI has 17.5M indexed namestrings
- The BSC could jump headlong onto web and go like gangbusters, heads pulling in multiple directions, but the result will no doubt be a nasty beast that hides its true strengths behind teeth, spit, and knobby horns.
- Or, the BSC can tentatively prance into this new world like a gentle unicorn; unseen by (most) taxonomist crumblies and revered by the kids that still have the purity of imagination.
- A grand vision that we all share is a facile list of all taxa that can be browsed, navigated (by some means), extracted, pre-linked to relevant literature, linked to useful, rapidly accessible information such as host, prey, distribution, type specimens, type localities. In short, a Canadian Entomological Encyclopedia of Life. But the reality of such a vision kicks in. Your time is limited, you need to publish, you need to teach, you need to chase funds to maintain a vibrant lab. Your students also have limited time to contribute to such an Encyclopedia, especially if it is unclear what will be the rewards. And so, let’s stick with what we do, strip it down to an easily produced manuscript, but tweak it to ensure the publication has the flexibility to remain competitive and to be a leader in this new biology.
- What emerged from these calls was a clear need to establish context or boundaries to a checklist. One idea was to encourage expression of taxon / biogeographic association.
- Come from ArcView shapefiles I found on Government of Canada web site, ingested into PostGIS (spatially-aware) database
- A proxy for the human capacity for submission to such a Journal