echinopscis at IBC2024

[nickynicolson]

We're presenting echinopscis at the International Botanical Congress in Madrid:

New advances in the development of echinopscis, an extensible notebook for open science on specimens
Nicky Nicolson, Eve J Lucas
Botany can claim to have led the way in the mobilisation of specimen metadata through digitisation. Botanical research groups also were central in the development of e-taxonomic systems to apply this digital information in networked research activities. With the subsequent growth of the open science movement, many generic research tools and working practices have become available. We will highlight tools and platforms which can be adapted for use to realise the vision of e-taxonomy and to enable researchers to easily access and use the wealth of data that is now available online. The echinopscis project is an experiment in creating an extensible notebook for open science on specimens, built on the generic note-taking software Obsidian. In contrast to early centralised e-taxonomic systems it operates on a local set of files stored in plain text (Markdown) format, enabling the user to have confidence about long term access to their data. It facilitates access to many of the components of the digital extended specimen, including literature, nomenclature, taxonomy, specimen metadata, images, and descriptive data. These data can be further contextualised through access to information stored in Wikidata, which supplies identifier mappings and can act as a broker between different information systems. The use of open data formats and generic data reconciliation standards should allow wider participation in the project and help to cement open science principles in the process of botanical taxonomy.

Also see: a writeup of the talk on the echinopscis blog: XX International Botanical Congress 2024