Monday, March 14, 2016

Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph

TL;DR; In order to build a usable biodiversity knowledge graph we should adopt JSON-LD for biodiversity data, develop reconciliation services to match entities to identifiers, and a use a mixture of document and graph databases to store and query the data. To bootstrap this project we can create wrappers around each biodiversity data provider, and a central cache that is both a document store and a simple graph database. This power of this approach should be showcased by applications that use the central cache to tackle specific problems, such as augmenting existing data.
Fig 1 full

I’ve thrown together some notes on building a biodiversity knowledge graph, and in the interests of making it interactive it's in the form of a web page: http://bionames.org/~rpage/towards-knowledge-graph/. There are buttons to click that display live data, and I hope to dd more examples as I flesh out the ideas. I'm hoping to have a fully-functioning live demo that can be used to explore the notion of a knowledge graph and demonstrate what we can do with it. It will be pretty obvious that this is all a bit crude, but my goal is to try and sketch out a fully-functioning system that can create and query the graph, and support interesting applications.