Liberating and re-use of data imprisoned in scientific literature

time: 2 pm Bogotá Presenter: Donat Agosti (Plazi), Laurence Bénichou (MNHN)

Biodiversity research results are contained in the ever-growing corpus of scientific publications, traditionally stored in, or provided through, academic libraries. Access to this literature can be difficult in terms of both findability and accessibility. In the digital age, this barrier can and should be lifted by opening publications to machine access, ensuring the data they contain adheres to the FAIR principles. This workshop provides a hands-on demonstration of the existing workflows to liberate data from legacy publications, as well as to publish in a semantically-enhanced way and to reuse the data. It will also highlight the benefits and opportunities provided by accessible, semantically-enhanced literature in the biodiversity domain. The workshop will have three parts:

1. Introduction by means of a hand-on exercise to the applied concepts, using existing workflows to convert a publication including biodiversity-related data from a PDF to a machine actionable format, for dissemination to GBIF, the Biodiversity Literature Repository, ChecklistBank, and OBIS;
2. Explanation of how to find, access and use the data, including for potential new data metrics, or use of the resources for AI applications to support for example IPBES and, potentially, generation of essential biodiversity variables;
3. Demonstration of services enabling direct semantic publishing.

Learning material