Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Lets talk: accessing scientific content through their vernacular names representations
Heimo Rainer, Wolfgang Koller

Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-10-08

Abstract


Work package 6 of the OpenUp! project www.open-up.eu deals with multilingual metadata enrichment, especially Common Names of biological organisms. The perspective is to release natural history multimedia content to the EUROPEANA cultural information portal to the general public.

From the technical perspective the main challenge arises from the diversity of sources and data formats. They range from Excel spread sheets, mainly originating from private initiatives of local or regional interest - to webservice based information networks with a broader auditorium, such as national GBIF focal points or regional initiatives like the Baltic Diversity.

Handling of these data sources engages a number of technologies on the backend and challenges of the aggregation turntable. A common approach is harvesting data into a local data store. This solution however has the problem that the information might be outdated already before harvesting has even finished.

As part of the OpenUp! project we have developed several mechanisms for handling such a diverse data environment without harvesting For a better performance with a cascading caching system has been implemented.

The service is exposed productive since the end of August 2013. Information is provided by an extended “Reconciliation Service API” as well as a SKOS based output format.

Data sources as of today include besides Catalogue of Life and PESI a wide range of languages from all Scandinavian languages, several Slavic languages incl. Russian, Dutch, Hebrew, Maori and will be complemented in the near future by Hungarian, Greek, etc. As an important side point discussions have been started with institutions representing the linguistic domain and a first set of data from Bavarian dialect lexicon for mushrooms is linked to our service.

Information can be retrieved from the webservice in form of parametrized requests at

http://openup.nhm-wien.ac.at/commonNames/?query={%22query%22:%22Berberis%20vulgaris%22,%22limit%22:3,%22type%22:%22/name/common%22}

or for SKOS output Format

http://openup.nhm-wien.ac.at/commonNames/?query={%22query%22:%22Berberis%20vulgaris%22,%22limit%22:3,%22type%22:%22/name/common%22}&format=skos