Removing Taxonomic Impediments: How the EOL and BHL Projects can help…. Graham Higley Natural History Museum, London At TDWG 2007

Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Life: A Web Site for Every Species Thanks to James Edwards, EOL

What is the EOL? 21st century on-line encyclopedia about Earth’s biological species With information about all described species And the millions more still to be described All presented in a common format –but user configurable All freely available over the Internet And accessible from a common portal

Encyclopedia of Life Core: a separate web site for each of Earth’s known species –Estimated to be 1.8 million validly known species Each site contains: –Introductory page for general public Vetted by experts Source of the information indicated (“attribution”) With links to the scientific literature –Additional pages for diverse user groups Molecular & evolutionary biologists Taxonomists Horticulturists, bird watchers Biodiversity-based industries (fisheries) School children, teachers, citizen scientists

EOL - why now? Technology can enable it –Mashups and wikis –“Species name” field common to virtually all biological databases So it can be used to link these databases together Many specialized databases to work with –Tropicos, FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, Ocean Biogeographic Information System, Catalogue of Life, Barcode of Life Database, … Great community & user interest in the idea Developing country scientists need the information –EOL can help to overcome the Digital Divide Foundations willing to fund its initial phases Institutions interested in making it happen

Cornerstone Institutions –Biodiversity Heritage Library Consortium –Field Museum of Natural History –Harvard University –Marine Biological Laboratory –Missouri Botanical Garden –Smithsonian (National Museum of Natural History) –SOON: Atlas of Living Australia –A LITTLE LATER: Paris Museum, Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc.

Species Sites Group Porting information from well-developed species databases (“low-hanging fruit”) –FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, Tree of Life Web, Catalogue of Life February 2008: 30,000 species pages Developing process for new pages –MBG to host plant species pages workshop on 31 Oct. to 2 Nov. In five years: 1 million species pages

Biodiversity Informatics Group Develops software for the project –Open-source, open-access –Standards and protocols Collaborates closely with other projects and organizations

Scanning and Digitization Group Biodiversity Heritage Library

Biodiversity Synthesis Group Innovative ways to use species-page data Help scientific community come to agreement on species names Develop new tools for analyzing and modelling data

Education and Outreach Group Develop curricula for school and college levels Work with citizen scientists to gather new data Help user communities to develop their own views of the data –Anglers –Bird watchers –Mushroom aficionados –Horticulturists –etc.

Status of EOL Launched May year cost ~ $70 m? $25 million committed by MacArthur and Sloan Foundations Cornerstone institutions pledged to raise additional $25 million EOL Portal v1.0 to open in February 2008 Challenges: –Enlisting the scientific community –Managing expectations Eager for more partners

Join us on this grand adventure

Biodiversity Heritage Library Thanks to Martin Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institute Library

What is the BHL Project trying to do? Digitize the core published literature on biodiversity and put on the Web Agree approaches with the global taxonomic community, rights holders and others

BHL partners –American Museum of Natural History –Field Museum, Chicago –Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology –Harvard University Botany Libraries –Missouri Botanical Garden –Natural History Museum, London –New York Botanical Gardens –Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew –Smithsonian Institution –Woods Hole Marine Research Laboratory Chinese Academy of Sciences have agreed to do the Chinese language zoological literature Australian Government likely to fund scanning as part of Atlas of Australian Life

Why do BHL now? Cost now low ~ € cents a page Other projects funded recently – BL/Microsoft = €4.5M Tractable, well-defined scientific domain with enormous public interest Taxonomic information has exceptionally longevity Supports GBIF and other international initiatives – including CBD, ABS, Darwin Declaration

Benefits of BHL Taxonomists and other scientists will have access to biodiversity literature - globally Will provide the developing world with access to the historical literature Scientists working in many biological domains – and other areas like meteorology, geology, ecology, EIAs, etc – will get access Images available to huge community of possible users outside science Advance objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity

Where are we now? Funding ‘Encyclopedia of Life’ project has allocated $3M for BHL in next 18 months. More to follow Harvard University has allocated $0.5M to BHL Significant in-kind support agreed with the Internet Archive Moore Foundation bid

How big is the Biodiversity domain? The domain as represented by the initial 10 institutions is: –Over 5.4 million books dating back to 1469 –About 800,000 monographs –40,000 journal titles, of which about 12,500 are current –About 50% pre-1923

What is BHL’s objective? Implemented by Biodiversity Heritage Library –Core literature pre-1923: 80 million pages –All pre-1923: million pages –All literature: million pages Already scanned more than 2 million pages MoBOT: prototype portal for the scanned literature MBL and MoBOT: taxonomic intelligence –Link modern names to old, out-of-date names Scanning via Internet Archive Scribes

Internet Archive Scribe: Boston

Internet Archive Scribe: London

BHL Components  Store all bibliographic metadata from the member libraries, with commitments  Create volume, part, piece metadata  Ingest page level metadata at scanning level  Creation of page level Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) for linking to other taxonomic services

BHL Components  Scan pages!  OCR the pages (and repeat regularly)  Taxonomic Intelligence – name management and linking to other name servers  Serve from multiple global locations using common platform (Fedora?)

Rights  Open Access: all content can be reused, repurposed, reformatted, sliced, diced, scraped  Creative Commons licenses  Opt-in Copyright Model: The BHL will actively work with professional societies, associations and commercial publishers to integrate their publications into the BHL

Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe

Global Species Information System G8+5 Environment Ministers identified need for ‘Global Species Information System’ –first EU meeting to address response endorsed the BHL as the way forward n.pdf

Meetings and discussions…. SYNTHESYS NA B Meeting, Paris EU Commissioner – Culture, Media, etc German museums – Berlin Dutch museums - Leiden

Activities and bids German Research Ministry has Euro250M for scanning French National Library is funding large scale scanning Netherlands is scanning in National Library eContentplus programme source for management and technical developments All scanning responsibility of national governments

Possible eContentplus Bid Encouraged to apply for Euro2-3M Lead by Germany 2 main components: –Management of process e.g. who scans what and where –Technical issues Distributed model Multiple language access Multiple language OCR Improved OCR on older materials Improved OCR on multiple languages

Future structure Web access BHL Portal & Taxonomic Intelligence Internet Archive German Node French Node Chinese Node European Digital Library French national node Chinese national node Multiple language interfaces

BHL EU partners –Museum fur Naturkunde, Berlin –Berlin Botanical Garden –University of Salzburg –Naturalis, Leiden –Paris Museum –Africa Museum, Tervuren –NHM –European Digital Library (EDLNet) –Wiley-Blackwell –BHL –Internet Archive Joining?: –Univeritat Autonoma de Barcelona

Prototype