Unknown knowns,
long tails, and long data
@rdmpage
http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Stressors and Drivers of Food Security: Evidence from Scientific Collections

We know this
We know we don’t
know this
We don’t know that
we don’t know this
known
unknown We know this, but we
don’t know that

“long data”

100,000 articles from http://biostor.org (BHL)
1923 today

Long tail
(Wikipedia pages for mammals)
Lots of very small articles
A few very large articles

Mining the biodiversity literature

Associations between species

http://biostor.org/maps

Biological Diversity in the Patent System
Paul Oldham, Stephen Hall, Oscar Forero
PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078737
“…human innovative activity involving
biodiversity in the patent system focuses on
approximately 4% of taxonomically described…”
@junglepaul

PMID:948206

http://biostor.org/reference/102054

http://data.gbif.org/occurrences/215921922/

BHL and GBIF as biomedical databases
http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/bhl-and-gbif-as-biomedical-databases.html
PubMed
(disease)
BioStor
(publication)
GBIF
(specimen)

Summary
• Open access literature is a potential goldmine
of information (long data, long tail)
• Text mining for entities (scientific names,
places, specimens, attributes) (search is still
the killer app)
• Linking things together (unknown knowns)