Vincent S. Smith& Dave Roberts

Top-down & bottom-up informaticsWho has the high ground?

…time to review status & impacts

Investment in Biodiversity InformaticsEU/UK Initiatives

• EDIT* (€11.5M, ‘06-’’11) • CATE* (£487k, ‘06-’09)

• SYNTHESYS I+II (€13M+€7M, ‘04-’13)

• LifeWatch (planning)* (€3M, ‘08-’11)

• ViBRANT* (€4.75M, ‘10-’13)

• eMonocot* (£1.96M, ‘10-’13)

Recent…

• Almost €40M Euros ($50M USD) committed over 9 years • Not all informatics! (address social & technical issues)

• Some overlap (intra and intra EU)

• Different development approaches (top-down & bottom-up)

Key facts

Goals

• Raise awareness of these initiatives• Review their major informatics products• Review their impact (through metrics of user engagement)• Identify successes & failures, commonalities & trends • Correlate these with different development models• Identify outstanding challenges

Briefly…

Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT)European Distributed

Goals…• Foster institutional integration• Towards a European Museum of Natural History• Functionally federate existing facilities• Operate at all levels (research, collections, policy, management)

Key products…• Cyberplatform• Scratchpads• Annual field course (training)• Integrated loans policy• Inventory task force• European e-Journal of Taxonomy

27 leading EU taxonomic institutions, 5-years, EU funded, €11.5 million

http://e-taxonomy.eu

The CyberplatformEDIT Informatics products

• Common Data Model (repository)• Accessed through a Java library• 3 types of installation package• Top-down design

• Collection of integrated tools• Supports the taxonomic workflow

(taxonomy, collection records, descriptions, literature, GIS etc)

http://wp5.e-taxonomy.eu

“Focus on continuous refinement … without being backed by an appropriate marketing and outreach activity will prevent interested newcomers to get hands-on the EDIT toolkit.”

EDIT Cyberplatform review, 2010

• 3 main user groups (paid)• Currently limited wider uptake

€5.1M

ScratchpadsEDIT Informatics products

• Hosted websites for taxonomists• Research & publication platform • Modular (Drupal) & flexible • Supports the taxonomic workflow• Bottom-up design, agile dev.• Ecosystem of communities (150+)• 2,000+ users (unpaid) from 2007• Follow on project (ViBRANT, €4.75M)

http://scratchpads.eu

€300k

Scratchpads - user engagement statisticsEDIT Informatics products

• Linear growth (sites, users, nodes,)• 10% of users return every month • Monthly returns across 1/3rd of sites• Incentivize growth (competition)• Rapid response to user feedback• Sociological study• Sites don’t look pretty

http://scratchpads.eu

2007 2008 2009

2,000200,000

1,500150,000

1,000100,000

50050,000

40

80

120

160

0

Sites Users

Nodes

As of 27 June 2010: Sites: 153Users: 2,015Nodes: 275,849

CATECreating a Taxonomic e-Science

• Software supporting web revisions• Consensus taxonomy • Peer review workflow• Top down design (EDIT CDM) • Two exemplar (paid) user groups

- Aroid plants- Sphingid moths

http://cate-project.org

• No uptake by other communities• Follow on project (eMonocot €2.4M)

€593k

Synthesis of Systematic ResourcesSYNTHESYS

• Paid support to access to collections• Mostly not informatics • Multiple phases • Data standards & protocols

• Portal interfaces to data collections

• Top down design

- ABCD (collections & observations)- Contributions to TAPIR protocol- National Collections Descriptions

- BioCASE (spec. & observations)- GeoCASE (geoscience extension)

http://synthesys.eu

Portal No visits

No page views

Unique visitors

Users from distinct countries

Total time spent by visitors

BioCASE/SYNTHESYS 4,364 38,750 3,425 53 19 days, 3 hrs

EDIT 2,956 30,416 2,165 49 15 days, 8 hrs

World 428 2,969 259 25 1 day, 14 hrs

Low levels of engagement with portals

Aug 2008 – July 2009

€??M

European Strategy on Research InfrastructuresLifeWatch - an EU ESFRI project

• €3M Euros of planning!• Top-down • A technical framework to support

• Estimate completion 2014 • Estimated cost €370M Euros!!!

- Ecosystem service valuations- Biological observations- Phylogenetics- Species dynamics & distribution- More?

http://lifewatch.eu

Observations & Conclusions

• Top-down development correlated with low usage (usually paid)• Top-down development is typically slow• Bottom-up development is dependent on user feedback • Bottom-up development encourages sustained user engagement

• Sustainability (institutional top-down support)• Development agility (bottom-up), not designed by committee• Duplication of effort (intra and inter EU)• Agreed metrics of impact (user engagement)• International collaboration (& funding)

Ongoing challenges

Questions?

BackgroundThe challenge

• Inventory the Earth’s species• Document their relationships• “Publish” & apply these data

Goal…

• 1.8 M described spp. (10M names)• 300M pages (over last 250 years)• 1.5-3B specimens

Data set…

People…• 4-6,000 taxonomists• 30-40,000 “pro-amateurs”• Many more citizen scientists?

e-ScienceApplied to biodiversity research

“the growing capacity of computing, storage, communication and software systems – offers the prospect of not only to automate science… but revolutionise how science is performed”

2001 UK Research Councilse-Science Initiative

• More collaborative• Network-based & distributed• Data intensive with terascale computing• Support high performance visualisation

Solutions to make science…

• Ring fenced (e-science) funding in UK and EU• European taxonomy / systematics community responded (slowly)

Result…