With somewhat depressing regularity I keep cycling back to things I was working on earlier but never quite get to work the way I wanted.

In the previous post I sketched out a workflow to annotate articles using hypothes.is and aggregate those annotations.

Over the weekend, out of the blue, Dan Whaley commented on an earlier blog post of mine (Altmetrics, Disqus, GBIF, JSTOR, and annotating biodiversity data. Dan is the project lead for hypothes.is, a tool to annotate web pages.

I stumbled across this intriguing paper: The authors are arguing that there is scope for a unit of publication between a full-blown journal article (often not machine readable, but readable) and the nanopublication (a single, machine readable statement, not intended for people to read), namely the Single Figure Publications (SFP): It seems to me that this is something that the Biodiversity Data Journal is potentially heading towards.

Browsing JSTOR's Global Plants database I was struck by the number of comments people have made on individual plant specimens. For example, for the Holotype of Scorodoxylum hartwegianum Nees (K000534285) there is a comment from Håkan Wittzell that the "Collection number should read 1269 according to Plantae Hartwegianae". In JSTOR the collection number is 1209. Now, many (if not all) of these specimens will also be in GBIF.

Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files.

Following on from earlier posts on annotating biodiversity data (Rethinking annotating biodiversity data and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis) I've started playing with user interfaces for editing data.

Following on from the previous post Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, here are some more thoughts on annotating biodiversity data. Annotations as sticky notes I get the sense that most people think of annotations as "sticky notes" that someone puts on data. In other words, the data is owned by somebody, and anyone who isn't the owner gets to make comments, which the owner is free to use or ignore as they see fit.

TL;DR By using bookmarklets and a central annotation store, we can build a system to annotate any biodiversity database, and display those annotations on those databases. A couple of weeks ago I was at GBIF meeting in Copenhagen, and there was a discussion about adding a new feature to the GBIF portal. The conversation went something like this: Resources are limited, and adding new features to a project can be difficult.

VertNet has announced that they have implemented issue tracking using GitHub. This is a really interesting development, as figuring out how to capture and make use of annotations in biodiversity databases is a problem that's attracting a lot of attention.