@cydparr @eol

Cynthia Parr, Katja Schulz, and Jennifer HammockTDWG 2012Beijing, China 25 October 2012

Leveraging an international infrastructureCase studies from the Encyclopedia of Life

Outline

• Briefly, who are we and why are we here?• The information landscape of species descriptions • Thoughts for the future

Note: Rubenstein Fellows Proposals are due 15 NovemberSee http://eol.org/info/Rubenstein_2013_competition

EOL aggregates and curates

Curate

CommentRate, Collect

eol.orgAggregate

Quality control

Third party apps

Why survey the landscape?

• Improve standards and set goals• Prepare for text mining• Learn how best to support quality control• Baseline for improving multilingual, open

content

• Because we can

>1.1 million taxon pages with content from more than 200 providers, 1000s individuals

5 million content objects

Total of 1,822,079 images 9,586 videos 28,569 sounds

Number of text objectsSu

bjec

t of t

ext o

bjec

t

DistributionMultiple topics

TypeInformationMolecularBiology

HabitatConservationStatus

ThreatsMorphology

ConservationManagement

TrendsSize

AssociationsUses

TrophicStrategyCyclicity & Life Cycle

PopulationBiologyReproduction

MigrationTaxonomy

LifeExpectancyIdentification

BehaviourEcology

Diseases

- 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 800,000

Many user-created EOL collections are local checklists

Other checklistsn=1662

Geographical checklistsn=618

License restrictions vary by object typen=~5 million

text images maps videos sounds0%

10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

public domaincc-bycc-by-sacc-by-nccc-by-nc-sa

n=~3 million

China

Australia

Dutch

South Africa

Costa Rica

Mexico Egypt

EOL interface now in 12 languagesVia translatewiki.org

India

Colombia

Peru

Taiwan

Norway

USA

However…

Vernacular namesin 163 languages

Text description objectsin 17 languages

Some providers get higher ratings than others

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

5 stars4 stars3 stars2 stars1 star

Total n = 154,308 rating actionsShowing only those 17 providers who got at least 1000 ratings

Full curators down-rate and non-curators up-rate

non-curators assistant curators full curators0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

54321

Assistant (n=177) & full curators (n=984) are different

assistant curators

full/master curators

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

common namesset exemplarratingtaxon associationsadd articlesclassificationstrust/untrust

33 actions per assistant curator227 actions per full curator

5816 223,639 actions

The case of “Panisopis”

Quality control case studies

1. Rod spots the error on EOL and posts about it on his blog2. Cyndy reads the blog and posts it as a comment on EOL3. The EOL comment gets sent to ITIS automatically 4. ITIS fixes its database

5. EOL hasn’t yet updated from ITIS

The case of the Far Side cartoon

Conclusions

• We’ve made a lot of progress– Large repository, many subjects– Great start on collections/checklists– Lots of CC-licenses– Lot of international partnerships and interface

languages– Active curators

• We’ve got plenty of room for more– Please share your ideas for the future

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Marine Biological Laboratory, Harvard University, David Rubenstein, and other funders and donorsAll our users, content provider & global partners

especially the Chinese Academy of SciencesEOL staff

@cydparr @eol

eol.org

Thanks to