The e-Biosphere 09 Informatics Challenge
The organizers e-Biosphere 09 issued the following challenge to researchers and users of biodiversity information:
Prepare and present a real-time demonstration during the days of the Conference of the capabilities in your community of practice to discover, disseminate, integrate, and explore new biodiversity-related data.
Over the 3 days of the conference, progress was shown in the form of rolling Powerpoint presentations on plasma displays throughout the conference hall, with a ballot held at the end to select the winner.
| 1. Translational Taxonomy - Collaborative effort coordinated by Robert Hanner (co-winner selected by ballot) |
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| 38 seafood samples were collected from London, Edinburgh, and Vancouver, then submitted for DNA barcode-based species identification to answer the question "Which city sells the most honest fish?" (June 1, June 3) |
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| 2. Visualising Biodiversity Digitisation In Real Time - Rod Page (co-winner selected by ballot) |
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| RSS feeds were created (via screenscraping) of sources of biodiversity news, aggregated, and visualized via Google Earth. (June 1, June 3) |
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| 3. Bioinfinity - Stephen Scott and colleagues from University of Nebraska Lincoln | ||
| Observations were collected in the field via iPhone app, uploaded to an ontology, and viewed by RSS subscribers. Subscribers amended classifications, and added comments, genomic data, etc. (June 1, June 3) |
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| 4. GUID Hosting Services - Kevin Richards | ||
| An easy to use LSID creation and hosting service was provided to those lacking capacity to manage their own LSIDs. (June 1, June 3) |
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| 5. Publication and Dissemination of Datasets with ZooKeys - Lyubomir Penev | ||
| A paper describing 42 new spider taxa was published in ZooKeys on day one of the conference; data files were published under separate DOI numbers and were automatically disseminated to GBIF, EOL, and other repositories over the next 3 days. (June 1, June 3) |
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| 6. Citizen science on the semantic web - Collaborative effort | ||
| Observations from multiple locations in North America and Europe were twittered and flickered, represented in RDF, and integrated via SPARQL query with biodiversity knowledge already in RDF. (June 1, June 3) |
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