Avoiding Islands

I’ve been inspired to start this blog by learning of the Linking Open Data project. This is a Semantic Web project to create a interlinked data commons on the web using RDF to link across open datasets. The project is still young, but has grown impressively. The figure at right is their diagram of the currently linked datasets. The whole network has well over 2 billion RDF triples in it, the datasets interlinked with approaching a million RDF links.

Though this network is rich, as of now it contains little in the way of scientific datasets. In the course of the Spire project, we would like to begin extending this network to biodiversity and natural history information sets. Of which there is a great deal of content already on the web; this catalog from TDWG lists 556 different biodiversity informatics projects to date.

The trouble with this set of biodiversity informatics projects is that the vast majority of these are islands, with little means to network these data across projects. History is partly to blame here — many of these projects were started before the rise of the Programmable Web, and the notion of supplying open web APIs for data access was simply not part of the developers’ thinking.

In the posts that follow, we will be exploring tools, projects, and other advances that may help to lead to a well-developed semantic network for natural history information.