We’ve presented echinopscis at the XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, Spain as part of a symposium called “Taxonomy as Open Science: Tool support to facilitate data use for hands-on practitioners”.
We explained our aim in developing the tool - we wanted something that sat between the two traditional ways to deliver technology. We didn’t want to build a website (as its harder to integrate your own data and working practices in this kind of project) and we didn’t want to deliver an API, as you need to be a programmer to use this effectively. We wanted to enable the use of advanced technology without requiring advanced technical skills.
This presentation includes a number of short demo videos, showing how you can use different Obsidian plugins (some developed through this project, so externally developed and customised here).
Wikidata
This plugin allows you to use an identifier in the frontmatter of a page to gather a list of related identifiers from Wikidata - using Wikidata as a “switchboard” to access related records elsewhere
Glossary
This plugin shows how you can look up a technical botanical term in a glossary - so that you have a reference resource side by side as you work.
Phylogeny viewer / navigation of notes
This demo shows how we can render a phylogenetic tree from newick text and use it to navigate your personal library of references and notes
AI “co-pilot”
Now a couple of demos which show how we can connect your local research notes to a remote AI assistant (a large language model).
Extraction of specimen references
This shows how we can reformat specimens examined paragraphs from your library of references into a table of specimen data - using the Darwin Core data standard from Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)
Reformatting descriptive data to trait matrices
Now we’re reformatting descriptive data into tabular form, so that we have a trait dataset from a text input.
Checklist
We finished with a checklist of practical actions for the audience - if you’re interested in the toolkit how can you get involved?
- Review the slides
- Sign up to github - also useful for participating other projects like GBIF.
- Participate on the discussion board
- Particularly:
- If we made a pre-populated echinopscis vault for your group, what data should we include?
- What kind of collaboration features do you need?