GBIF has reached 1 billion occurrences which is, of course, something to celebrate: An achievement on this scale represents a lot of work by many people over many years, years spent developing simple standards for sharing data, agreeing that sharing is a good thing in the first place, tools to enable sharing, and a place to aggregate all that shared data (GBIF). So, I asked a question: My point is not to do this: Rather it is to

First off, let me say that what follows is a lot of arm waving to try and obscure how little I understand what I'm talking about. I'm going to sketch out what I think is a "radical" idea for a GBIF Challenge entry. The motivation for this idea comes from several sources: 1. GBIF is (under-)funded by direct contributions from governments, hence each year it essentially "begs" for money.

Last year I finished my four-year stint as Chair of the GBIF Science Committee. During that time, partly as a result of my urging, GBIF launched an annual "GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge", and I'm please that this year GBIF is continuing to run the challenge. In 2015 and 2016 the challenge received some great entries.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Nico Franz and Beckett Sterner created a stir last year with a preprint in bioRxiv about expert validation (or the lack of it) in the "backbone" classifications used by aggregators.

Notes on how many georeferenced DNA sequences there are in GenBank, and how many could potentially be georeferenced.

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.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Do you know the party game "Telephone", also known as "Chinese Whispers"? The first player whispers a message in the ear of the next player, who passes the message in the same way to a third player, and so on. When the last player has heard the whispered message, the starting and finishing versions of the message are spoken out loud. The two versions are rarely the same.

Nico Franz and Beckett W. Sterner recently published a preprint entitled "To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design Behind Aggregated Biodiversity Data" on bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/157214 Below is the abstract: Below I respond to some specific points that annoyed me about this article, at the end I try and sketch out a more constructive response.

GBIF is running its Ebbe Nielsen Challenge for the third successive year. This year the title is Liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse. To quote from the Challenge background on Devpost: In essence, the 2017 Challenge is to develop tools to discover these biodiversity-relevant datasets, and make them available to GBIF.

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.