Bibliography of Life: comprehensive services for biodiversity bibliographic references

The underlying principle of the Bibliography of Life is to provide taxonomists and others with a freely accessible bibliography covering the whole of life. Such a bibliography has been achieved for specific study areas within taxonomy, but not for “life” as a whole. Now the ViBRANT project has produced the two components needed to realize the concept of a Bibliography of Life: RefBank and ReFinder. RefBank is a network of servers that store, identify duplicates, and parse the components of bibliographic references. ReFinder is designed to discover and download references from a wide range of open access online bibliographies, such as CrossRef, PubMed, Mendeley, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), RefBank, BioStor, BioNames and others

Bibliography of Life: a freely accessible bibliography of every taxonomic paper ever published

The underlying principle of the Bibliography of Life is to provide taxonomists and others with a freely accessible bibliography covering the whole of life. Such a bibliography had been achieved for specific study areas within taxonomy, but not for “life” as a whole. Now the EU FP7 ViBRANT project has progressed the Bibliography of Life and produced the two components needed to realize this concept - RefBank and ReFinder. RefBank is a network of servers to store, deduplicate and parse bibliographic references. ReFinder is designed to discover and download references from a wide range of open access online bibliographies, such as CrossRef, PubMed, Mendeley, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), RefBank, Biostore, Bionames and others. Demonstrations of these two components are being run as part of BIH2013

Exploiting connectedness in the informatics curriculum

The power of modern communication technology gives us an opportunity, as Informatics educators, to enhance our ability to develop our students' skills in virtual teamworking. We discuss why virtual teamworking is as relevant for students in traditional campus-based universities as it is in a distance learning context. We highlight some of the questions to be answered, and some of the problems to be overcome, in the context of our experiences in designing and delivering a virtual teamworking course at the UK Open University

One document, many users: what happens when you re-purpose a document?

To assess global challenges surrounding issues such as climate change and invasive species requires a baseline of historical data. We are fortunate in biodiversity that such data exists in a rich body of literature. One such source of historical data is the Biologia Centrali-Americana (BCA), which documents the plant and animal life in Central America one hundred years’ ago, and which can be compared to contemporary species distributions. This valuable resource has recently been re-keyed and manually marked up by the INOTAXA project (http://www.inotaxa.org/). The 56-volume work is now being curated before wider release. The manual annotation of the BCA is both time consuming in its initial phases and demands expert review to curate the results. This manual approach to mining historic texts is not viable for large-scale works such as the BCA. Attempts to automate the process face the problem of not having suitable corpora against which to develop and then test automated solutions such as text mining. One project, ViBRANT (http://vbrant.eu/), sought to use the scale of the re-keyed data being produced by INOTAXA to develop a solution to this problem. However, this apparently straightforward task has thrown up many issues because different audiences have different requirements of the mark up. This presentation describes the process by which the BCA is being reworked from digitisation through to a curated document corpus. The intended users are biodiversity scientists who can use the corpus for taxonomic and biodiversity research, and computer scientists who can use it to develop new text mining and mark up tools. The presentation covers the different requirements of scientists in the two domains, how this affects the mark up required of the documents, and how to re-purpose the annotations to meet the needs of different and sometimes disparate scientific audiences

Developing Online Team Skills

This paper discusses the development and delivery of a new course at the UK Open University (OU). The course makes a virtue of the fact that OU students study in a predominantly distance learning environment, by providing a structure within which team working activities are carried out with no face-to-face contact whatsoever. Issues that were considered in designing this course and decisions about tutoring and assessing the students' team working experience are discussed. Preliminary results from the first delivery of the course, including analysis of archived team conferences, are presented. Directions for future development and enhancement are indicated

From XML to XML: The why and how of making the biodiversity literature accessible to researchers

We present the ABLE document collection, which consists of a set of annotated volumes of the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). These follow our work on automating the markup of scanned copies of the biodiversity literature, for the purpose of supporting working taxonomists. We consider an enhanced TEI XML markup language, which is used as an intermediate stage in translating from the initial XML obtained from Optical Character Recognition to the target taXMLit. The intermediate representation allows additional information from external sources such as a taxonomic thesaurus to be incorporated before the final translation into taXMLit