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(2+6) Connecting the Herbarium to Wikidata around playful experiences and storytelling
We have merged Challenge 2 - Designing Wikidata and Challenge 6 - historicalMAP, and are developing concepts to involve more people, stimulate public awareness and engagement, and create educational materials about the natural world.
Cover photo: Michele Jurietti
1. Figma Concept 2. Leaflet/Wikidata Demo
Living Herbarium: Team 2 is connecting the Herbaria of UZH & ETHZ to Wikidata, creating playful experiences with storytelling 🍂🌿🌼🍁 > #GLAMhack2022 @supsi_ch @wikidata @ChWikidata @usys_ethzh @eth @ETH_en @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @alg2115 @loleg pic.twitter.com/LTkzA5A1p4
— Opendata.ch (@OpendataCH@mastodon.social) (@OpendataCH) November 4, 2022
Design Notes
Our initial brainstorm is clustered around three topics: Location/Mapping, Specie(s) and History/Change. We collected ideas of experiences and working steps we wanted to achieve at the hackathon.
Using a Miro board we further elaborated our designs, used a collage to organise our ideas, and started putting together a workflow based on which user interaction can be developed.
Figma Concept App
We are now elaborating the interaction design using Figma, which you can preview here:
Data preparation
We are a small team with about a 50/50 split of technical and design background. None of us are domain experts, but we received detailed guidance and had some very helpful and inspiring meetings with our expert and data provider Alessia Guggisberg who works at the ETH and maintains Vascular plants datasets. We are also in contact with another team working on this data:
(14) Search batches of herbarium images for text entries related to the collector, collection or field trip
They downloaded and kindly helped us to get a first look of the data, which is too large to work with in a spreadsheet program. In parallel, we looked into the way WikiSpecies data is structured on Wikidata, and read up on the import mechanisms for making contributions. There has been prior work in bridging GBIF and Wikidata, which we wished to leverage.
💡 Read more in Does Biodiversity Informatics 💘 Wikidata?
Using OpenRefine and Frictionless Data Creator we have prepared a schema file comapatible with open data tools. This is a Data Package based on a new extract from GBIF. It is filtered to three species with good coverage (around 15'000 observations) in Switzerland, as recommended to us by Alessia.
Dataset of herbaria and vascular plant observations
Data Package 🌐 www 🌐 json
- occurrence-ticino ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Leaflet/Wikidata live demo
Based on this we were able to create a simple web app, which displays a Leaflet map with locations pulled in from a Data Package, and photos of species from Wikidata APIs. The data can be easily updated / filters expanded, and based on this demo app further work is possible.
Screenshots:
Our work continues on GitHub - click the Source link for details.
Next steps
- Meet with our expert next week to discuss results.
- Get support for further design & development work.
- Discuss our results with the Wikidata community
- Connect with citizen science (iNaturalist) communities
- Explore outdoor sensing (TTN) projects.
- Get inspired by cool museum exhibits (Lenzburg)
- Keep hacking on biodiversity data!
Living Herbarium
A Data Package that is part of a #GLAMhack 2022 project to explore an extract from the Swiss National Databank of Vascular Plants. This dataset was recommended and queries provided by Dr. Alessia Guggisberg at the Institute of Integrative Biology (IBZ), ETH Zurich.
For more details visit our Project Page
Notes
We removed all empty / repetitive columns from the dataset. This is therefore not a 1:1 complete export, and you should visit the corresponding GBIF query.
In order to respect the currently nationally agreed ethical framework while simultaneously sharing scientifically utilizable data for large scale studies, Swiss biodiversity data is generally published generalized to 5km grid squares. Altitude information corresponds to raw data.
Attribution
Data citation:
GBIF.org (05 November 2022) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.v8r2q5
Datasets:
- United Herbaria of the University and ETH Zurich
- Swiss National Databank of Vascular Plants
Usage Rights:
CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
The contents of this website, unless otherwise stated, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.