Some quick notes on interface ideas for digital libraries and/or knowledge graphs. Recently there’s been something of an explosion in bibliographic tools to explore the literature.

On Tuesday I was in Canberra to visit the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO and give a talk on knowledge graphs.

While working with linked data and ways to explore and visualise information, I keep coming back to the Haystack project, which is now over a decade old. Among the tools developed was the Haystack application, which enabled a user to explore all sorts of structured data. Below is a screen shot of Haystack showing a sequence for Homo sapiens cyclin T1 (CCNT1), transcript variant a, mRNA.

I've tweaked Ozymandias to now include short natural language summaries (snippets) for various taxa. This makes the output a little more friendly and informative. For example, here's a snippet from the page on Cephalodesmius , a dung beetle that makes its own dung. These snippets come from Wikipedia, well actually, from the DBpedia project.

I've written up my entry for the 2018 GBIF Challenge ("Ozymandias") and posted a preprint on Biorxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/04/485854). The DOI is https://doi.org/10.1101/485854 which, last time I checked, still needs to be registered. The abstract appears below. I'll let the preprint sit there for a little while before I summon the enthusiasm to revisit it, tidy it up, and submit it for publication.

In the spirit of release early and release often, here is the first workable version of a biodiversity knowledge graph that I've been working on for Australian animals (for some background on knowledge graphs see Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph now in RIO). The core of this knowledge graph is a classification of animals from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) combined with data on taxonomic names and publications from the Australian

Some random notes on the first day of TDWG 2017. First off, great organisation with the first usable conference calendar app that I've seen (https://tdwg2017.sched.com). I gave the day's keynote address in the morning (slides below). Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph from Roderic Page It was something of a stream of consciousness brain dump, and tried to cover a lot of (maybe too much) stuff.

I've been viewing Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video from 1987 and it's striking how much of this we have today, and yet how far away we are from the complete vision. For some background on this promotional video see The Making of Knowledge Navigator.

In the previous post I sketched out a workflow to annotate articles using hypothes.is and aggregate those annotations.

I’ve thrown together some notes on building a biodiversity knowledge graph, and in the interests of making it interactive it's in the form of a web page: http://bionames.org/~rpage/towards-knowledge-graph/. There are buttons to click that display live data, and I hope to dd more examples as I flesh out the ideas.