Plazi: An expedition to discover known biodiversity
11:30 am-12:30 pm ET
Q?rius Theater, National Museum of Natural History
Plazi uncovers vast troves of data and citations contained in the published record. Donat Agosti will discuss some of the first findings from the project in both human and machine-readable formats at TreamentBank, Biodiversity Literature Repository and the fledgling Openbiodiv biodiversity knowledge management system.
Intended for a scientific audience, the talk will include suggestions how this knowledge can be made immediately accessible upon publishing, bridging the gap from publication to the underlying data, mainly the specimens housed in the natural history collections, genomic databases and citizen science networks. The talk will end with a discussion with the audience on strategies to enhance the efficiency of the expeditions.
Donat Agosti is a swiss biologist with a PhD degree from ETHZ with an extensive track record of field work and publications; research posts at the Natural History Museum London, American Museum of Natural History and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Since 2008 he has been founding president of Plazi, a Swiss NGO promoting open access to scientific results. He has been involved since 1996 in fostering open access to biodiversity data, data conversion workflows to build open data repositories, e.g. such as the Biodiversity Literature Repository at Zenodo and TreatmentBank at Plazi including supplying taxonomic data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the US National Center for Biotechnology Information. He is involved in setting up a joint venture between Pensoft and Plazi to provide services to convert publications into semantically enhanced discoverable, citable and reusable data.
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