Biodiversity Informatics at the Natural History Museum Ed Baker Terrestrial Invertebrates, Department of Life Sciences & NHM Informatics Initiative

Science as a Slow Cooker Only the surface visible Lid kept on for extended periods of time Uses cheap cuts of raggy meat Ingredient lose their nutritional value Children at risk due to high temperatures

We like data 70 million+ specimens collected over 400 years 350,000+ books ??? Unpublished datasets in archive, notebooks, computers ??? In the minds of staff

How do we provide access? Digitisation of specimens and associated data Scanning and transcribing books, journals, archives Providing tools for managing the data life cycle Changing the way we publish: data publication

Flowing Data Publication Collection Curation Use

Flowing Data Collection Curation Somebody retires Somebody dies Project is cancelled Sits in desk drawer or on a hard drive until….

Flowing Data Collection Curation Use Data Publication Re-use Publication Re-use

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Collection Curation Use Data Publication Re-use Publication Re-use

Collection Citizen Science Automated identification and monitoring Traditional taxonomic sources

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Curation Use Data Publication Re-use Publication Re-use

Curation Websites for communities to publish and curate: Taxonomy / nomenclature Bibliographies Specimen information Character matricies

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Use Data Publication Re-use Publication Re-use

Use: Oboe

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Data Publication Re-use Publication Re-use

Publication (Data) Datasets Single species descriptions Checklists Software

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Re-use Publication Re-use

Publication (Research) Traditional research Systematic zoology Phylogeny Biogeography

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse Re-use

The Problem of Scale Data is being generated by tens of thousands of researchers, in thousands of institutions Hard to find what you need Hard to know if what you need actually exists Impossible to go through researcher by researcher

NHM Data Portal Aggregator for NHM science data Visualisation tools for datasets Allows export of NHM data for re-use

The Informatics Landscape >18K specimen records (local small scale coverage) >276M specimen records (worldwide coverage)

The Informatics Landscape A webpage for every species Aggregate specimen and observation data globally

Wikimedian in Residence Make NHM content available under open licenses for use on Wikimedia projects (and elsewhere) Reach of Wikipedia: BBC, Encyclopedia of Life Wikisource: Transcription and translation crowd-sourcing

Flowing Data: from collection to reuse ? ?

"Everybody makes mistakes. And if you don't expose your raw data, nobody will find your mistakes." Jean-Claude Bradley