In preparation for WikiCite 2017 I'm looking more closely at extracting bibliographic information from Wikispecies. The WikiCite project "is a proposal to build a bibliographic database in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects". One reason for doing this is so that each factual statement in WikiData can be linked to evidence for that statement.

At present BioStor provides a simple display of an article extracted from BHL. You get the page images, and sometimes a map and an altmetric "donut". But we can do better than this. For example, I'm starting to experiment with displaying a list of literature cited by the article.

Following on from previous posts The Semantic Web made fun: d3sparql and The Biodiversity Heritage Library meets Wikidata via Wikispecies: adding author identifiers to BioStor I've put together an example query that can be used to extract a taxonomic classification from Wikidata.

I've added an experimental feature to BioStor that uses data from Wikidata and Wikispecies to augment what information BioStor displays on authors.

Given a big corpus of literature one of the fun things to do is look at how the use of a term has changed over time. When did people first use a particular word? When did one word start to replace another, etc.? Google's Ngram Viewer is perhaps the best known tool for exploring these questions.

Following on from adding DNA barcodes to GBIF I've now uploaded a taxonomic classification of DNA barcode BINs (Barcode Index Numbers). Each BIN is a cluster of similar DNA barcodes that is essentially equivalent to a species.

I've uploaded all the COI barcodes in the iBOL public data dumps into GBIF. This is an update of an earlier project that uploaded a small subset. Now that dataset doi:10.15468/inygc6 has been expanded to include some 2.7 million barcodes.

Continuing my on-again off-again relationship with the Semantic Web, I stumbled across a cool approach to visualising the results of SPARQL queries.

Willi Egloff, Donat Agosti, Puneet Kishor, David Patterson, and Jeremy A. Miller have published an interesting preprint entitled “Copyright and the Use of Images as Biodiversity Data” DOI:10.1101/087015 in which they argue that taxonomic images aren't copyrightable. I'm not convinced, and have commented on the bioRxiv site.

One of the most interesting aspects of EOL is "TraitBank", which has been described in a recent paper: TraitBank is available in JSON-LD, and so is potentially part of the Semantic Web.