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The first half the presentation briefly discusses MetriDoc’s architecture while the remainder of the presentation will include code samples to illustrate problems it can solve. Information on how to contribute or download MetriDoc will be provided as well.
== Open Data and the Biodiversity Heritage Library experience ==
* Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Gardens, trish dot rose dash sandler at mobot dot org
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international consortium of the world’s leading natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. From the beginning the BHL partners conceived of the BHL collection as being “open” – available to anyone regardless of geographic location or affiliation and a linked into a global Biodiversity Commons. This talk will discuss the basic principles of open data and use BHL as one example of how those principles have played out in a real world context.
What does it mean for data to be “open” and what tools or services can enable this? Our metadata is purposely “open” so that others can harvest it and repurpose it in different contexts. We make it available through both OAI-PMH and APIs.
If you “open” your data will they come? In some cases yes. BHL can give examples of scientists and science services, who have taken our data and exploited it for other purposes (e.g. BioStor, Earthcape, EOL, ZipcodeZoo) Yet, in a recent BHL survey we learned that of our frequent users, 42% were not aware that we provided APIs and 31% did not understand what APIs were. Clearly promotion of your open data is a key activity to making it truly useful.
What are some advantages to open data? Harvestable data allows that data which was created for a specific purpose and audience (e.g. historic texts, nomenclatural services, encyclopedias) to interact with other data and serve new, previously unimagined, roles. For BHL, opening our data it was a desire to do three things 1) make biodiversity data available to foster scientific research 2) support the public use of these data and 3) build a web of science.