Martin Graham & Jessie Kennedy Edinburgh Napier University VESPER Visual Exploration of Species-Referenced Repositories

VESPER – an exploration into data quality issues for Darwin Core Archives (DWCA) DWCA’s are files for storing detailed species-based data sets How does a user know which data sets are useful and complete? Introduction

GBIF has tools to test DWCA validity This work is about visualising data we assume is “valid” but are unsure of “usefulness” –Taxonomy is broken –Dates are wrong –Lions in the sea In many cases the usefulness of such data is only seen when visualised in context Valid vs. Useful

Web-based visualisation of DWCAs –Uses HTML5 SVG, CSS3, FileWriters, ArrayBuffers –D 3 toolkit –Client side only Visualise basic dimensions of data –Taxonomy –Geography –Time –& Miscellaneous Stats Approach

Darwin Core Archives Meta.xml Eml.xml Core Taxa/Occurrence Data Extension Meta Files (XML) Data Files (CSV) Describes Exactly one Zero or more Extension ID == Core ID

Zip files make things smaller –Good for network transport –But analysing the data means we have to make things big again Zapped by Zip Expand a lot Expand even more (String copying, UTF-16 etc)

Partial Unzip Analyse fields listed in meta file –Disregard verbose fields Find combinations of fields that can be used to generate a visualisation List choice of available visualisations for a meta.xml and just extract chosen fields Zip Zapped Implicit Taxonomy acceptedNameUsageID, parentNameUsageID Explicit Taxonomy Any of Kingdom, order, family, genus etc Map decimalLongitude, decimalLatitude Timeline eventDate

Sunburst / Icicle plot –Some difficulties with high fan-out taxa –Though a lot of these are data quality issues Taxonomy

Sunburst / Icicle plot –Some difficulties with high fan-out taxa –Though a lot of these are data quality issues Taxonomy

Based on popular leaflet.js library –And Markercluster plugin –Some adaptations to show selected items Geography

Simple bar chart –With rangeslider –Zoom in and see yearly patterns (i.e not much at xmas) Temporal

Sanity check - Empty data count Miscellaneous

Taxonomic fan-out for hollow curve anomalies Export selected IDs –These can be saved or sent somewhere else Miscellaneous

Selections in one view are reflected in the other views for the same data –Multiple views, linking Selection

Javascript visualisations for DWCA archives Quickly shows areas of quality issue Can handle large archives if only key fields are analysed Conclusion

per/demoNew.htmlhttp:// per/demoNew.html –Feedback welcome Thanks to GBIF, Canadensys, EMBL for data Funded by BBSRC Ask for a demo Fin