The 2017 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge will award a total of €14,000 to developers and data scientists who create tools capable of liberating species records from open data repositories for scientific discovery and reuse.
This year's Challenge will seek to leverage the growth of open data policies among scientific journals and research funders, which require researchers to make the data underlying their findings publicly available. Adoption of these policies represents an important first step toward increasing openness, transparency and reproducibility across all scientific domains, including biodiversity-related research.
To abide by these requirements, researchers often deposit datasets in public open-access repositories. Potential users are then able to find and access the data through repositories as well as data aggregators like OpenAIRE and DataONE. Many of these datasets are already structured in tables that contain the basic elements of biodiversity information needed to build species occurrence records: scientific names, dates, and geographic locations, among others.
However, the practices adopted by most repositories, funders and journals do not yet encourage the use of standardized formats. This approach significantly limits the interoperability and reuse of these datasets. As a result, the wider reuse of data implied if not stated by many open data policies falls short, even in cases where open licensing designations (like those provided through Creative Commons) seem to encourage it.
The 2017 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge seeks submissions that repurpose these datasets and adapting them into the Darwin Core Archive format (DwC-A), the interoperable and reusable standard that powers the publication of almost 800 million species occurrence records from the nearly 1,000 worldwide institutions now active in the GBIF network.
The 2017 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge will task developers and data scientists to create web applications, scripts or other tools that automate the discovery and extraction of relevant biodiversity data from open data repositories. Such tools might generate datasets ready for publication on GBIF.org by:
Background on Darwin Core and Darwin Core Archives
Examples of datasets manually harvested and published from open-data repositories
Global compendium of Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus occurrence
LTER sampling-event dataset, Bird census at the beach of Doñana Natural Space
The following list is not by any means exhaustive. We welcome suggestions on other relevant services to highlight for prospective Challenge entrants.
Keeping the 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge in mind, GBIF is particularly interested in tools that address data biases and fill gaps by mobilizing occurrences from under-represented geographies, taxa, time periods, or thematic areas like vectors of human disease or alien and invasive species.
GBIF is also eager to see tools capable of converting open-access repository datasets into the quantitative 'sampling-event' format recently supported in the Darwin Core standard. Such datasets can capture richer information like species abundance, presence/absence, level of effort, and standard sampling methodologies and protocols.
Special thanks to the Swedish Research Council for its support of the 2017 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge.
June 15, 2017 - Sept. 5, 2017
GBIF
Online
$14,000