ViBRANT Overview

ViBRANT
Virtual Biodiversity

ViBRANT

Virtual Biodiversity Research and
Access Network for Taxonomy:
Project Overview
Ed Baker
Natural History Museum, London
edwab@nhm.ac.uk

ViBRANT

Outline

•  Some background / why ViBRANT?
•  Goals / what makes ViBRANT different
•  What ViBRANT will do
•  Logistics & collaboration
•  Measures of success
•  Longer term vision

ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

Outline


ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

Our problem
The challenge of 21st Century taxonomy

Goal…
•  Inventory the Earth’s species
•  Document their relationships
•  “Publish” & apply these data

Data set…
•  1.8 M described spp. (10M names)
•  300M pages (over last 250 years)
•  1.5-3B specimens
People…
•  4-8,000 taxonomists
•  30-40,000 “pro-amateurs”
•  Many more citizen scientists?

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ViBRANT

Towards a solution
The European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy

•  A Network of Excellence (NoE)
•  29 leading European, North American,
& Russian natural history collections-based
institutions
•  Circa 12M €, funded under EU FP6
•  March 2006 - February 2011

Products…
•  Funding
•  Training & outreach
•  Websites
•  Integrated scientific activities
•  Inventories
•  Computer tools

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ViBRANT

Scratchpads
http://scratchpads.eu

•  Hosted websites for taxonomists
•  Research & publication platform
•  Modular (Drupal) & flexible
•  Supports the taxonomic workflow
•  2,500 users (unpaid) from 2007
•  Ecosystem of communities (~200)

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ViBRANT

Outline


ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

Goals of ViBRANT
To set up the means, tools and infrastructure to produce a more rational
and a more effective framework for European Biodiversity research.

Connecting people…
ViBRANT connects people studying biodiversity regardless of their location.
Each community website (Scratchpad) contains tools and services that enable
users to study biodiversity in all its different facets.

Connecting data…
Information about biodiversity is scattered in a myriad of different places.
ViBRANT helps defragment this information providing a window on the natural
world that can be filtered according to users needs.

Connecting science…
ViBRANT bridges the gap between the producers & consumers of taxonomic
information, providing the tools to help explain & predict the distribution of life
on Earth.

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ViBRANT

What we will do
E-Infrastructure products
•  A Virtual Research Environment (Scratchpads) where users can safely store,
share and manage data.
•  Analytical services for users to build identification keys and phylogenetic trees.
•  A publication platform for users to automatically compile manuscripts from their
research database.
•  A portal for users the best Virtual Research Environment
Creating to centrally access publicly accessible biodiversity research
information and literature. & systematic research community
for the taxonomic
•  Training, support & sociological study, helping research communities to use
these tools and services.
•  A standards compliant technical architecture that can be sustained by
biodiversity research community.

ViBRANT is primarily a tool, secondarily a data provider

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ViBRANT

Who is doing it
•  The Natural History Museum, London (NHM)
- Scratchpad VRE development & management
•  Hellenic Center for Marine Research, Crete (HCMR)
- Extension into ecol.,con. & citizen science, esp. marine biodiversity
•  Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS)
- Training, outreach & community support
•  Oxford e-Research Centre (UOXF.E9)
- Mol. ID tools, services and data analysis
•  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
- User studies (sociological studies of user practices)
•  Julius Kühn-Institute (JKI)
- Data integration via controlled vocabularies & ontologies
•  Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin (MFN)
- Biodiversity inventorying & monitoring (mobile devices)
•  University of Amsterdam (UvA)
- Standards development (PESI)
•  The Open University (OU)
- Data mining and bibliographies (BHL)
•  Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
- Document Markup & natural language text processing
•  Vizzuality (Vizz)
- Data visualisation & analysis (data layers)
•  Pensoft Publishers (PENSOFT)
- Push-button manuscript submission from the Scratchpad VRE
•  Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6 (UPMC)
- Morphological identification keys and services (Xper2)
•  Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
- Controlled vocab. dev. & userbase expansion via GBIF nodes
•  Freie Universität Berlin (BGBM)
- Data aggregation portal via CDM
•  Université de la Réunion (UdlR)
- Mathematics & HCI of taxonomic identification keys
17 partners in 9 countries
•  University of Trieste (universities, museums & SMEs)
- Key2Nature integration & outreach

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ViBRANT

What makes ViBRANT different

Its (mostly) not research
ViBRANT is primarily about tools & services

Its is about audiences
ViBRANT is driven by its users (old & new)

Our work program is flexible
Re-writing our deliverables is one of the deliverables!

ViBRANT is agile
The perpetual beta - like taxonomy

ViBRANT is sustainable
We do things simply & cheaply, such that we can maintain them

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ViBRANT

Outline

•  Some background / why ViBRANT

ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

Macro Organisation (CP-CSA)
•  WP1. (435,125 €) Management, coordination & administration (7 partners)

Networking Activities (1,805,885 €)
•  WP3. (683,242 €) Training, outreach & community support (4)
•  WP4. (713,784 €) Standardisation (5)
•  WP8. (408,859 €) Ecological and conservation data mobilization (5)

Service Activities (1,025,578 €)
•  WP5. (755,913 €) Interaction and data services (5)
•  WP6. (269,665 €) Scholarly Publishing (2)

Research Activities (1,483,411 €)
•  WP2. (858,495 €) Technical architecture (2)
•  WP7. (624,916 €) Biodiversity literature data access & data mining (4)

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ViBRANT

Outline


ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

ViBRANT logistics
•  Started December 2010 (36 months)
•  Project website (http://vbrant.eu)
•  Virtual Research Communities, CP-CSA, EU FP7
•  €6.2M Euros (EU Contribution €4.75M)
•  17 Partners in 9 countries, 603 person months

Collaboration (not just EU)…
•  ESFRI Projects: LifeWatch, ELIXIR & EMBRC
•  GBIF - controlled vocabularies, nodes & observational data recording
•  PESI, 4D4Life & related EU projects
•  Encyclopedia of Life, Barcode of Life & Biodiversity Heritage Library
•  South African National Biodiversity Institute & Atlas of living Australia

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ViBRANT

Outline


ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

Short term success metrics
User engagement as a measure of success*

Networking (tools and collaboration)
•  How many people are using our tools
•  How deep is their engagement with these tools
•  How are these tools changing what they would otherwise do

Services (data & processing data)
•  How much internal data is being called from outside the system
•  How much external data is being called from inside the system
•  How much are our services being used to add value

Research (discovery of new information or approaches)
•  Traditional academic metrics (publications, presentations, blogs etc)
•  Uptake within ViBRANT & outside the consortium

both quantitative & qualitative (WP3)*

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ViBRANT

Longer term success metrics
Once ViBRANT project is over

Persistence & sustainability
•  Maintaining what we do (perhaps without money)
•  If its valued, it will endure
•  Not everything will persist!

Finding new audiences
•  ViBRANT is primarily about taxonomy & taxonomists
•  Engage more people as “taxonomists” (e.g. citizen scientists)
•  Reach out to other sectors e.g. conservation & ecology

Embed our products outside the consortium
•  Take up by other initiatives, especially outside the EU
•  E.g. LifeWatch service centre, GBIF Nodes, publishers, CBoL, EoL

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ViBRANT

Outline


ViBRANT

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ViBRANT

(My) Longer term vision
Taxonomy’s three problems, & my view of how we fix them

Defragmenting our output
•  Tools that support technical & social workflows of taxonomy
•  Provide the means to (loosely) aggregate that content ViBRANT

Speeding up out output
•  Digitising collections
•  Increasing our workforce (engaging non-professionals)
•  Coordinated & standardised programs for new kinds of output

Improved labeling & findability
•  Simple & persistent identifiers on defined concepts of everything
•  Simplifying how we define (publish) concepts

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ViBRANT

Where taxonomy is now
And where we might like to be…

You are
here

•  Built of links
The 1st Internet
•  1 trillion pages
4-node ARPAnet - 1969 •  2 billion users

from Hobbes’ Internet timeline (http://bit.ly/dtBJ2i)

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ViBRANT

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ViBRANT Overview

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