Real use cases for Semantic Information from the Mining Biodiversity project

The Mining Biodiversity project explores the transformation of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) into a next-generation social digital library resource to facilitate the study and discussion (via social media integration) of legacy science documents on biodiversity by a worldwide community and to raise awareness of the changes in biodiversity over time in the general public. The resulting digital resource would provide fully interlinked and indexed access to the full content of OCR text library documents, via semantically enhanced and interactive browsing and searching capabilities, allowing users to locate precisely the information of interest to them in an easy and efficient manner. Sharing with different colleagues involved in efforts to enhance the accessibility of biodiversity data through well-defined semantics-rich representations it was recommended to focus first into the real questions that users had, but through initial consultations with potential users of this semantically-enhanced information, it became apparent that the functionality would not be required for their daily use of data. A further close collaboration with actual final users of the corpus of information allowed the team to discover a valuable set of real use cases for Semantic Information from the Mining Biodiversity project.  This talk will demonstrate current real information needs that interoperable semantics for biodiversity data and knowledge can support. It will also highlight areas challenged by the lack of machine-interpretable semantics that could help address them and suggest potential solutions.