Merging Art and Science in Biodiversity Research
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This document summarizes the Art of Life project, which aims to enhance access to natural history illustrations in the Biodiversity Heritage Library by automatically identifying and describing them. The BHL is a digital library containing over 44 million pages from its partner institutions. The Art of Life project is developing algorithms to identify illustrations on pages and build descriptive metadata by testing techniques like analyzing picture blocks, contrast, color, and compression. A Macaw interface allows classifying pages identified by algorithms and crowdsourcing on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons can add descriptions. Over 1.5 million pages have been processed so far, identifying 300,000 pages with images. The goals are to serve scientists, artists, historians and teachers by enriching content in BHL
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Merging Art and Science in Biodiversity Research
- 1. Merging the Worlds of Art and Science IFLA Section on Science & Technology August 19,2014
- 2. Trish Rose-Sandler Center for Biodiversity Informatics, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA Nancy E. Gwinn Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC, USA Constance Rinaldo Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
- 3. What is Biodiversity Content?
- 4. Digital Repository of Books Field Notebooks Journals • Extensive • Open • Global • Linked
- 5. What is the Biodiversity Heritage Library? Digital Library 78,947 Titles 141,770 Volumes 44,275,666 Pages
- 6. • American Museum of Natural History Library • California Academy of Sciences Library • Cornell University Library • Harvard University Botany Library • Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology • Library of Congress • Marine Biological Laboratory Library • Missouri Botanical Garden Library • Natural History Museum, London Library • The New York Botanical Garden Library • Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, Library • Smithsonian Libraries • Washington University at St. Louis Library • University of Illinois Library • United States Geological Survey Libraries 15 MEMBERS 4 AFFILIATES BHL Central • Academy of Natural Sciences Library • Chicago Botanical Garden Library • The Field Museum Library • Los Angeles County Natural History Museum Library
- 7. Global Partners Europe China Australia Egypt Brazil Africa Singapore
- 8. BHL = Libraries + Technology + Science of animals, plants, nature in general (Taxonomic literature) • Type in a taxon name and find in the text corpus. • Systematic biology is for scientists—the taxonomic impediment is resolved.
- 10. BHL Book Viewer
- 11. Challenges Millions of natural history illustrations Very few have metadata that describe their content or where they are in the book
- 12. BHL and Flickr—90,000 Images Only pretty pictures Still too manual Many illustrations not included
- 13. o Full title— o Grant given to in St. Louis, Missouri o Funded by U.S. o Runs Art of Life?
- 14. Goals/Objectives o Define for natural history illustrations o Build algorithms to of illustrations o Enhance existing tools to adding descriptive metadata into BHL and images and metadata more widely
- 15. How to Identify Illustrations? Algorithms to automate identification of images tested: Picture blocks 87-88% effective Contrast 87-88% effective Color ineffective Compression ineffective
- 16. Web Application For analyzing & visualizing algorithm results
- 17. Basic Workflow
- 18. Macaw An interface for classifying pages identified by algorithms
- 19. Crowdsourcing Flickr tagging Wikimedia Commons apply schema For adding description of illustrations
- 20. Describing Natural History Illustrations Schema = VRA Core with elements from Darwin Core
- 21. Art of Life Status o Running algorithms o 1.5 million pages processed o 300,000 pages with images o Estimate will be 15% of corpus—pages with images results—78,000 pages so far o Testing to Wikimedia Commons o Testing from tool o BHL architecture modified and ready to newly created metadata
- 22. o Images serve o Scientists o Artists o Historians o Teachers Benefits o Rich content o If specimens are gone, may be to document a species algorithms and analysis tools on github github.com/IMAmuseum/artoflife tool (Macaw) on github github.com/cajunjoel/macaw-neh
- 24. Questions? For more information: Trish Rose-Sandler, Principal Investigator trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life
Editor's Notes
- BHL is An extensive repository of biodiversity literature (44 million pages +). open access – all content is either public domain or licensed under Creative Commons. Global in content coverage and partners links to other regional and global initiatives
- All content is served from Internet Archive and at specialized BHL portal In portal Can search by keyword, scientific name, or by article Browse by Title, author, date or collection
- BHL is a VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION BHL Central is formed by 19 organizations in US and UK: Global BHL includes BHL central and the other countries on the slide Membership subscriptions support operational/administration/technical work.
- Primarily supports taxonomists in biodiversity But ...is used by many disciplines other than science particularly the illustrations. Brief explanation of what is taxonomy in context of natural history. Explain specifically the taxonomic impediment: Years of work can be compressed.
- BHL Book viewer showing a scientific name search result Through web services we can match species name thesauri with content in BHL. Then link out to related sites such as the Encyclopedia of Life
- 5 primary objectives Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations Build algorithms to automate identification of illustrations Enhance existing tools to classify illustrations (e.g. drawing vs map) Crowdsource further descriptions (e.g. species, illustrator) Integrate metadata into BHL portal and share images and metadata more widely
- Indianapolis Museum of Art developed algorithms Tested four but used only 2 due to effectiveness
- Django web application for analyzing and visualizing the algorithm results
- Developed Tool for classifying the illustrations Developed at Smithsonian Libraries Modified a tool called Macaw used for adding page level metadata to books
- On the left is Flickr where BHL can share illustrations and users can tag them On right is Wikimedia Commons where BHL can share illustrations and users can describe them using the Art of Life schema
- Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema