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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with taxonomic-intelligence

BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL Improves the Speed and Accuracy of its Taxonomic Name Finding Services with gnfinder

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BHL has deployed a new taxonomic name finding tool to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying names throughout its 58+ million pages.

BHL is now usingGlobal Names Architecture’s (GNA) gnfinder tool to locate taxonomic names in the BHL corpus. Prior to this deployment, BHL’s name finding services were based on an index of scientific names created by GNA developers six years ago by parsing every page in BHL one by one. This took 45 days to accomplish, and the cost of repeating this process made updating or improving the index infeasible.

The gnfinder tool uses fast, scalable programming languages to significantly reduce computational time. Using Open Source applications in Go and Scala, the tool detects candidate scientific names and compares them to millions of scientific name-strings aggregated by GNA for verification. The new process decreases the time needed for name detection and name verification from 35 days to 5 hours and from 7 days to 12 hours, respectively. As a result, the entire BHL corpus can now be indexed in less than a day, compared to the 45 days needed for the previous index. Additionally, by significantly reducing computational time, implementing iterative improvements to the index is now achievable.

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July 21, 2020byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel, User Stories

Rod Page Talks Bioinformatics, Linked Data, and Primary Literature at the Smithsonian

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On 22 September, Dr. Rod Page, Professor at the University of Glasgow and creator of BioStor, gave a presentation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Library about ideas for extracting and linking data across biodiversity repositories and primary literature. The talk, entitled “The Sam Adams Talk,” covered topics including phylogenetics, geophylogeny visualizations, linking article and specimen data across repositories, annotations, the biodiversity knowledge graph, and data as source code.
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September 29, 2016byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel

How’s your fern and bird coverage, BHL?

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“Every one knows what a bird is,” asserts an early 20th century book that I found while browsing the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). As I’ve learned during my Professional Development Internship with Jacqueline Chapman at Smithsonian Libraries this summer, it’s not always that simple. Taxonomy is ever-changing, especially at the granular level needed by subject specialists around the world who use BHL to conduct research on organisms ranging from mosses to turtles to fungi. BHL is a consortial digital library whose member libraries digitize works in natural history and botany based on both user requests and subject librarians’ selections.
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August 23, 2016byBecca Greenstein
Blog Reel, User Stories

BHL and Our Users: Rod Page and BioStor

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This week, we feature one of our users that has been extraordinarily active in not only using BHL content, but in creating applications that significantly enhance the information and knowledge that can be gleaned from our resources. The creator of BioStor and a huge player in the realm of biodiversity informatics, meet Dr. Roderic Page!

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June 7, 2011byRoderic D. M. Page

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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