all creatures great and small: metadata for biodiversity illustrations

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project

All creatures great and small :metadata for biodiversity

illustrations


What is Art of Life?

• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis• Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities• Runs May 2012-April 2014


What is BHL?

• A consortium of 14 natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions

• An open access digital library for legacy biodiversity literature• An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic

information• An increasingly global effort


Why the need for Art of Life?

Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is limited to page by page scroll or viewing selection of images in Flickr, not searchable by image content (e.g. corn, zea mays)


Page by page scroll

Table of contents


5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life

Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations

Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus

Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these identified visual resources.

Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations

Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for access and preservation


Current status of Art of Life• Development of the algorithm is about 70% complete and will

be done by Jan 2013• Draft schema available for public review

http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• Classifier tool – reusing an existing BHL tool developed by Joel

Richard called Macaw http://code.google.com/p/macaw-book-metadata-tool/


Art of Life SchemaNeeds to support three objectives:

(1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators;(2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms; and(3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.


Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (borrowed 9 elements)– LIDO– Darwin Core (borrowed 2 elements)– Dublin Core


ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required

TitleTypeDateCopyrightSourceAgentSubjectsDescriptionInscription


Title Stictospiza formosa

Type Paintings

Date Publication: 1898

Agent Author: Arthur G. Butler (1844-1925)Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946)

Description A pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds

Subjects Scientific name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green MuniaAccepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Birds, finches

Inscriptions bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa)

Source Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895

Rights Public domain

Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Biodiversity_Heritage_Library

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895


Thanks to Art of Life team!Co-PIs:

Doug Holland and Trish Rose-Sandler, from Missouri Botanical GardenAlgorithm development:

Ed Bachta and Charlie Moad; from Indianapolis Museum of ArtSchema development:

Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, from University of Colorado, BoulderWilliam Ulate, from Missouri Botanical Garden

Programming:Mike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden

Former PI for Art of LifeChris Freeland, Washington University


Interested? Here’s how you can help• We welcome your feedback on the schema! http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• If you know of scholars and users who would be interested in these types

of images and would be interested either in participating in our survey or a brief focus groups about the schema please have them contact me [email protected]

• Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons

mailto:[email protected]


Thanks! For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

Contact: [email protected]@mobot.org

http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

mailto:[email protected]

all creatures great and small: metadata for biodiversity illustrations

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