Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Conference Abstract
Visualizing Biodiversity Information using Wikidata and Scholia
expand article infoDaniel Mietchen‡,§,|,, Steph Tyszka‡,§, Tina Heger‡,§,#, Maud Bernard-Verdier§, Camille Musseau‡,§, Jonathan Jeschke§
‡ Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany
§ Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
| Ronin Institute of Independet Scholarship, Montclair, United States of America
¶ Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), Jena, Germany
# Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany
Corresponding author: Daniel Mietchen (daniel.mietchen@igb-berlin.de)
Received: 29 Aug 2022 | Published: 07 Sep 2022
© 2022 Daniel Mietchen, Steph Tyszka, Tina Heger, Maud Bernard-Verdier, Camille Musseau, Jonathan Jeschke
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Mietchen D, Tyszka S, Heger T, Bernard-Verdier M, Musseau C, Jeschke J (2022) Visualizing Biodiversity Information using Wikidata and Scholia. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e94184. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.94184
 Open Access

Abstract

Biodiversity research and education take place in a socio-cultural ecosystem that connects researchers and educators with the objects and methods of study, with facilities and organizations as well as with the natural and cultural worlds they are embedded in. Data about these different kinds of entities is typically distributed across a wide range of databases and other resources that differ not only in their scope and accessibility but also in the ways in which they model the data and link it to other parts of the knowledge ecosystem.

Over the course of the last ten years, many resources have been integrated systematically with Wikidata - a multilingual, open and FAIR platform for the collaborative curation of general reference data (Vrandečić and Krötzsch 2014). Wikidata approaches data integration and data curation with the "anyone can contribute" spirit that it adopted from its older sibling Wikipedia, extending this spirit to facilitate automated contributions and explorations.

This presentation will zoom in on visualizing biodiversity-related information in Wikidata, highlighting research and education aspects as well as associated curation workflows and the role of standards in enabling, enriching, maintaining, expanding and refining such workflows. Special attention will be paid to demo-ing Scholia, an open-source Wikidata frontend (Nielsen et al. 2017) that can be used to visualize and explore what Wikidata knows about fields of study as well as relevant institutions, taxa, collections, individuals, funders, databases, locations, publications, methodologies, ontologies and related matters, including relevant hypotheses and terminology in multiple languages.

While examples will be drawn from many corners of biodiversity, special emphasis will be given to information pertaining to the study and management of biological invasions (Jeschke et al. 2021).

Keywords

biodiversity data; collaborative curation; linked open data; interoperability; multilingual information; biological invasions; data visualization; citizen science;

Presenting author

Daniel Mietchen

Presented at

TDWG 2022

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the VolkswagenStiftung under grant number 97863 to Jonathan M. Jeschke for the project "Towards an open, zoomable atlas for invasion science and beyond".

References

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