A talk presented January 19, 2013 in the Indo-US Joint Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bangalore, India.
HTML Injection Attacks: Impact and Mitigation Strategies
Species pages and portals
1. Encyclopedia of Life
Serving the building blocks of biodiversity knowledge
Cynthia Parr @cydparr
Joint Indo-US Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics @eol
Bangelore, 20 January 2013
2. Problems
• Specialist communities make their own
species pages
• Duplicating effort is costly
• Hard to find scattered information
• Not always aimed at the right audience
• Hard to compare and know what to trust
• New applications have to start over
The solution?
3. The solutions
Make sure specialist communities thrive
& develop resources they need
Encourage coordination and sharing with credit
and rewards
Provide tools for data discovery, exchange,
improvement & re-use
4. EOL aggregates and curates
Scientific Databases
Scientific Journals
Direct text contribution
Links to BHL, etc. Curate
Aggregate
Comment
Rate, Collect
eol.org
Quality control API
Third party apps
5. >1.1 million taxon pages with content
from more than 200 providers
1000s individual contributors
5 million content objects
63,000 members
1,163 curators
6.
7. Example biological content
on details tab
EOL Table of Contents TDWG Species Profile Model
Overview › Distribution #Distribution
Physical Description › Morphology #Morphology
Physical Description › Size #Size
Ecology › Habitat #Habitat
Ecology › Associations #Associations
Life History & Behavior › Life Expectancy #LifeExpectancy
Evolution and Systematics › Functional Adaptations #Evolution
Conservation > Conservation Status #ConservationStatus
Molecular Biology and Genetics › Genetics #Genetics
11. EOL curation
Master curators
Full curators
Assistant Curators
Add & prefer common names
Trust or untrust
Fix taxon Set exemplar image
problems Add new ID
Set preferred Members
name and
classification Rate Comment
Add new text
12. Norway
Dutch
USA Taiwan
Mexico China
Egypt
India
Costa
Rica Colombia
Peru
Australia
South Africa
EOL interface now in 12 languages
Via translatewiki.org
22. Summary
• Focus on building blocks
• Multiple audiences
• Scalable
• Sustainable
• Improvable
Building Species Pages workshop 4 – 6pm today
parrc@si.edu
23. Thanks to
Our funders
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Smithsonian Institution
Marine Biological Laboratory
David Rubenstein
and other funders and donors
All our content providers and global partners
Volunteer curators and individual contributors via Flickr,
Wikimedia, and members of EOL
ATREE and all of you
Notas do Editor
Whirlwind tour to EOLAs you may know, Encyclopedia of Life is a web site providing global access to knowledge about life on earth.Global – the whole worldAccess – free, and freely re-usableKnowledge – synthesized, not rawLife on Earth – biological diversity
EOL takes information from about 200 sources so far, mostly scientific databases, but also including Flickr and Wikipedia, and automatically sorts it onto on taxon pages based on the names. Within each page, the information is sorted by subject. Our curators can then trust or untrust it, or anybody can provide comments or ratings. About a thousand credentialed scientists have already volunteered to help with quality control. Actions and comments get fed back to the original providers, and the material on EOL is also available to other applications via an Application Programming Interface, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.We’re partnering with over two hundred scientific databases as well as public conribution sites like Flickr and Wikipedia.100+ partner databases700 curators/1000s contributors/46,000 members2.8 million pages500 thousand pages with Creative Commons contentOver 2 million data objects and >1 million pages with links to research literatureTraffic in past year: 1.7 million unique users, 6.2 million page views
This is a media gallery for arachnids
Collections might be practical, like helping people learn more about the foods that we eat, like posting lists of wanted things, like this list of microorganisms found by Jessica Green in the air ducts of office buildings.Help people put their information in context that are meaningful to them.Do you want crowds to help annotate items in the collection with a controlled vocabulary? Do you want to know the average riches of pages in the collection?
These are only checklists that have more than one item.
Free for third party applications, as long as licenses are respectedField guidesMobile applicationWeb page widget
You can also use EOL for crowd-sourcing. For example, Jennifer Hammock has started a collection called “Mystery associates” and asked people to try to identify the partners shown in photos that have some sort of ecological association. When they’ve been identified, like this sea star and anemone predation interaction, then she moves the image to the “known associates” collection. This adds to the information we have from a bunch of partners on food web interactions, and then would be available for foodweb modelers. There are many other possible ways that the large crowds on EOL could be harnessed to generate new datasets from EOL content. And this is all possible to some degree now.