Visualising biodiversity digitisation in real time

Rod PageUniversity of Glasgow

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We are learning more about biodiversity every day…

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gathering new data…

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discovering new species…

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publishing papers…

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Some of this knowledge is being broadcast… …using RSS

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We want RSS feeds that

• Have timestamps

• Are georeferenced

• Have taxonomic names as tags

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Geo RSS

geotagged (latitude, longitude, woeid)

taxonomic name (machine tags)

timestamp

like

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But what if no RSS?

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We can make it ourselves

http://bioguid.info/rss

Secret sauce(= screen scraping)

Web page RSS

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Then add tags using services

Georeferencing

Taxonomic names

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Now we have RSS…

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But…

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…is anybody listening?15

Challenge: aggregate and display RSS

Merge RSS feeds, add missing georeferencing and taxonomic names

Display where, when, what

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Which gives us…

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http://bioguid.info/ebio09/www/3d

Visualising biodiversity digitisation in real time18