Intro to Bionomia (external web service for Agent data)
Channel: ARCTOS
Date: 2022-04-12

Title: Bionomia: A community-driven utility to help build disambiguated links between people and natural history specimen records in support of data roundtrips

Presenter: David Shorthouse (Bionomia)

Abstract: Bionomia, https://bionomia.net was launched in August 2018 as an open, community-driven link curation platform with a particular purpose: to give credit to collectors and determiners of natural history specimens and to help showcase their efforts. This requires shared, unique identifiers – or digital signposts – to best express an individual's identity, ideally with machine-readable services that provide structured biographical information such as dates of birth, dates of death, affiliations, occupations, aliases, publications, among other details that can all be applied in novel ways to both search for and to cross-validate specimen data. It also requires sensitivity to privacy. As such, Bionomia makes use of ORCID IDs for the living and wikidata Q numbers for the deceased. The former is additionally used to coordinate secure, passthrough authentication. Specimen data are refreshed from the Global Biodiversity Information once every few weeks to maintain a practical level of synchrony with the organizations that make their data openly available to the international network.

One of the goals for Bionomia is to facilitate the roundtrip of links between people and specimen records, back into collection management systems from whence the semi-structured metadata emerged. This is an interesting socio-technical challenge that must accommodate the heterogeneity of data models while simultaneously sharing the provenance of links as annotations. It is trust and verifiable evidence that drive the cyclical design of data roundtrips, not merely the technical mechanics.

In this seminar, I will demonstrate the tools, services, and search techniques in Bionomia with the expectation that we spawn new dialog about data models, efficiencies in data curation that may help to share the load, and most importantly, the valorization of human effort required to do good specimen-based science.

When: Tuesday, April 12 @ 1pm MT/12pm PT