all creatures great and small: metadata for biodiversity illustrations
DESCRIPTION
This is a talk proposed by Gaurav Vaidya (University of Colorado Boulder), William Ulate (Missouri Botanical Garden), Robert Guralnick (University of Colorado Boulder), and Trish Rose-Sandler (Missouri Botanical Garden) The Art of Life project is developing a metadata schema for describing and improving access to the natural history images contained in the 38 million pages digitized by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. These images paint a vibrant picture of Europeans’ first encounters with exotic plants and animals in the 17th and 18th centuries, drawn by some of the finest illustrators in the world. They also provide valuable documentation of when, where, and who first observed a species. We present our preliminary schema, which accommodates a variety of delivery systems, including Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, and varying levels of information detail.TRANSCRIPT
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
All creatures great and small :metadata for biodiversity
illustrations
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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)
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Page by page scroll
Table of contents
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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/
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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.
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (borrowed 9 elements)– LIDO– Darwin Core (borrowed 2 elements)– Dublin Core
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required
TitleTypeDateCopyrightSourceAgentSubjectsDescriptionInscription
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
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
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDLF Forum 2012 Denver CO Art of Life project
Thanks! For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life
Contact: [email protected]@mobot.org