Leveraging an international infrastructure: Case studies from the Encyclopeda of Life
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This document summarizes a presentation about leveraging international infrastructure for species descriptions using the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) as a case study. It describes EOL's efforts to aggregate and curate over 1 million taxon pages from 200 providers. It analyzes the types and languages of content, license restrictions, ratings of providers, and the roles of curators. It also discusses opportunities to improve standards, support quality control, and make content more multilingual and open. Case studies demonstrate how EOL coordinates with other databases to resolve errors. The presentation concludes that EOL has made progress but there is still room to expand coverage and engage more users, content providers, and funders.
Leveraging an international infrastructure: Case studies from the Encyclopeda of Life
- 1. Leveraging an international infrastructure Case studies from the Encyclopedia of Life Cynthia Parr, Katja Schulz, and Jennifer Hammock TDWG 2012 @cydparr Beijing, China 25 October 2012 @eol
- 2. Outline • Briefly, who are we and why are we here? • The information landscape of species descriptions • Thoughts for the future Note: Rubenstein Fellows Proposals are due 15 November See http://eol.org/info/Rubenstein_2013_competition
- 3. EOL aggregates and curates Curate Aggregate Comment Rate, Collect eol.org Quality control Third party apps
- 4. Why survey the landscape? • Improve standards and set goals • Prepare for text mining • Learn how best to support quality control • Baseline for improving multilingual, open content • Because we can
- 5. >1.1 million taxon pages with content from more than 200 providers, 1000s individuals 5 million content objects
- 6. Total of 1,822,079 images 9,586 videos 28,569 sounds
- 7. Number of text objects - 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 800,000 Distribution TypeInformation Subject of text object Habitat Threats Conservation Trends Associations TrophicStrategy PopulationBiology Migration LifeExpectancy Behaviour Diseases
- 8. Many user-created EOL collections are local checklists Geographical checklists n=618 Other checklists n=1662
- 9. License restrictions vary by object type n=~5 million 100% 80% public domain 60% cc-by 40% cc-by-sa cc-by-nc 20% cc-by-nc-sa 0% text images maps videos sounds n=~3 million
- 10. Norway Dutch USA Taiwan Mexico China Egypt India Costa Rica Colombia Peru Australia South Africa EOL interface now in 12 languages Via translatewiki.org
- 11. However… Vernacular names Text description objects in 163 languages in 17 languages
- 12. Some providers get higher ratings than others 100% 80% 5 stars 60% 4 stars 3 stars 40% 2 stars 20% 1 star 0% Total n = 154,308 rating actions Showing only those 17 providers who got at least 1000 ratings
- 13. Full curators down-rate and non-curators up-rate 100% 90% 80% 70% 5 60% 4 50% 3 40% 30% 2 20% 1 10% 0% non-curators assistant curators full curators
- 14. Assistant (n=177) & full curators (n=984) are different 5816 223,639 actions 100% 90% 80% 70% common names 60% set exemplar 50% rating 40% taxon associations add articles 30% classifications 20% trust/untrust 10% 33 actions per assistant curator 0% 227 actions per full curator assistant full/master curators curators
- 15. Quality control case studies The case of “Panisopis” 1. Rod spots the error on EOL and posts about it on his blog 2. Cyndy reads the blog and posts it as a comment on EOL 3. The EOL comment gets sent to ITIS automatically 4. ITIS fixes its database 5. EOL hasn’t yet updated from ITIS
- 16. The case of the Far Side cartoon
- 17. Conclusions • We’ve made a lot of progress – Large repository, many subjects – Great start on collections/checklists – Lots of CC-licenses – Lot of international partnerships and interface languages – Active curators • We’ve got plenty of room for more – Please share your ideas for the future
- 18. Thanks to John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Marine Biological Laboratory, Harvard University, David Rubenstein, and other funders and eol.org donors All our users, content provider & global partners @cydparr especially the Chinese Academy of Sciences @eol
Editor's Notes
- #2: As you may know, Encyclopedia of Life is a web site providing global access to knowledge about life on earth.Global – the whole worldAccess – free, and freely re-usableKnowledge – synthesized, not rawLife on Earth – biological diversity
- #4: EOL takes information from about 200 sources so far, mostly scientific databases, but also including Flickr and Wikipedia, and automatically sorts it onto on taxon pages. Our curators can then trust or untrust it, or anybody can provide comments or ratings. About a thousand credentialed scientists have already volunteered to help with quality control. Actions and comments get fed back to the original providers, and the material on EOL is also available to other applications via an Application Programming Interface, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.We’re partnering with over two hundred scientific databases as well as public conribution sites like Flickr and Wikipedia.100+ partner databases700 curators/1000s contributors/46,000 members2.8 million pages500 thousand pages with Creative Commons contentOver 2 million data objects and >1 million pages with links to research literatureTraffic in past year: 1.7 million unique users, 6.2 million page views
- #7: These numbers a bit out of date now
- #8: These are only the top subjects, there are many more. Subjects are almost all infoitems from the TDWG Species Profile Model. Multiple topics includes several vague subjects like “Biology” “TaxonBiology” and “Description”
- #9: These are only checklists that have more than one item.
- #10: Images are less than half the amount of text (1.37 million). Far fewer examples of videos and sounds, but these are expected to grow.
- #13: Not going to name names, except to say that the two to the right here with more 5 star ratings are flickr and Wikipedia, and the ones on the left are the museums and specimens.
- #15: Full curators have credentials and have more power. Assistant curators do relatively more adding of common names, and are also more likely to add article text.Full curators are the only ones that can trust or untrust (red)Both spend a lot of time rating objects (1 to 5 stars)So far, few full curators are working with classifications.
- #16: One point: would have been faster if Rod had just posted the comment directly.Another point: Obviously it would be better if EOL regularly updated from IT IS, because it has been four months and we stil don’t have the correction on EOL.
- #17: This was discovered on EOL by a curator. It was a slide in a Smithsonian botanist’s slide deck that an intern scanned and added to the specimen catalog. Luckily it was “identified” as “Undetermined”. Because it was spotted by an EOL curator, the museum was able to remove it from their catalog.