1) The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) contains over 100,000 books and 39 million digitized pages of biodiversity literature from the 18th-21st centuries. 2) BHL provides structured metadata and unstructured text from OCR to allow for searching and data mining through APIs, a user interface, and data exports. 3) A key challenge for BHL has been accurately extracting scientific names of organisms from the historical literature, which it has addressed through algorithms like TaxonFinder and new collaborations. 4) BHL is now exploring gamifying tasks like correcting OCR and identifying images to engage users in improving data quality and extracting additional information from

1. BHL: Big Data, Big Challenges
Chris Freeland @chrisfreeland
Founding Technical Director, BHL
Sr. Director, University Academic Computing,
Washington University

2. >100,000 books, > 39 million pages, > 70TB data

3. BHL Architecture: Window Seat Ed.
Access
Data
APIs UI
Exports
Logic
Geocoding
Firewall
Data Transform
Name BHL DB Utilities
Finding
Storage
Images (JP2) Internet Archive
PDF
Coordinate-based OCR
XML metadata

4. BHL Content: Structured Data
• Metadata from Library catalogues at
title/volume level
<titleInfo>
<title>CaroliLinnaei ... Species plantarum :exhibentesplantas rite cognitas, ad genera
relatas, cum differentiisspecificis, nominibustrivialibus, synonymisselectis, locisnatalibus,
secundumsystemasexualedigestas...</title>
</titleInfo>
<titleInfo type="abbreviated"><title>Sp. Pl.</title></titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart>Linné, Carl von,</namePart>
<namePart type="date">1707-1778</namePart>
</name>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<genre authority="marcgt">book</genre>
<originInfo>
<place><placeTerm type="text">Holmiae :</placeTerm></place>
<publisher>ImpensisLaurentiiSalvii,</publisher><dateIssued>1753.</dateIssued>

5. BHL Content: Unstructured Data
More than 39 million pages!
….of uncorrected OCR 

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STUTTGART.
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1843.

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8. How to connect/consume
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Developer+Tools+and+API
Data
APIs UI
Exports
BHL DB
Internet Archive
Images (JP2)
PDF
Coordinate-based OCR
XML metadata

9. BHL Data Challenge: Name Finding
pre-2007

10. BHL Data Challenge: Name Finding
• TaxonFinder algorithm in production since
2008
– More than 100 million candidate name strings
– More than 1.5 million unique, verified names
– Available through UI, APIs, Data Exports & Internet
Archive
• New collaboration with Global Names
– Improved algorithm, better precision & recall
– More data!

11. New Data Challenges
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/BHL+and+Gaming
^Challenges framed as games
• Correcting OCR
• Rekeying Tables of Contents
• Researching candidate Scientific Names
• Image identification & extraction
– http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life
– Currently funded by NEH