Meeting 5

11/6 10:00-11:00am 371 Barrows Hall ####Attendees Jonathan, Jong-kai, Carlos, Jorrit (remote), Jen Hammock (EOL, remote), Katja Schulz (EOL, remote) and Yurong He (Mayland's iSchool, remote)

####Agenda

1. Seminar feedback
2. Funder use case
3. Review static demo page (check numbers, etc)
4. Expanding data (increase accuracy, more organisms, dynamic data)
5. Assign issues

####Seminar Feedback

• Biologists don't seem to agree on the completeness measure.
  • According to people from EOL, marine life researchers have their own estimates for species completeness
    • We should explain somewhere on the page where do we get our estimate from (calculation)
    • Or maybe we should provide options for evaluating completeness in other calculation metrics (in the future)
    • Guralnick: expert estimates come from IUCN range maps (which could poses licensing issue to us: They are cautious on the misuse of their data)
• completeness over time
  • Would be great if we could add the time dimension to our website (ex: a time slider bar to show the evolving of occurrence data)
• completeness over area
  • The fuzziness of the area selection doesn’t really matter to biologists, species do move/migrate
  • Islands as natural border is good enough
• add more organisms
  • start with birds, mammals, amphibian, reptiles
  • Aside from GBIF, we should also look into other public data (from state agencies)
  • Other sources: iNaturalist, ebird, IDBio
  • We could also allow citizens to submit their observations (But we should label the data source, either from scientist or from citizen)
• Inference
  • It is also possible to use knowledge of data-completed area to infer the existence of unobserved species in incompletely-documented area
    • Jong-kai's comment: I don't think we should go this route though, this is orthogonal to our goal: promote data-sharing
• marketing
  • Rather than promote sharing by creating competition, we should try to see this from a complementary, tool-sharing perspective
  • We should promote discussions between data providers and eco-station managers (list contact information)
  • Searching the common species could be the feature of most interests among scientists
  • Yet, Different research interest could require different fields in the data, we should talk to more scientists to have a better model design
  • Before our tool, scientist are already sharing data through email and meetings (but rather privately)
    • We should demonstrate better capability to their existing tools
    • One big pain is: if scientists need a quick and dirty estimations, they don’t quite have a tool (say during a flood or volcano eruption, what is the impact to local species? What is the priority of rescues or human-aided migration, if any? How to determine such priority based on data?)

####Actions Short-term:

• We should explain somewhere on the page where do we get our estimate from (calculation)
• We should talk to scientists to gather their real demand
  • Detailed data fields of interest
  • Regarding existing tools / methods of data sharing, where could be improved?
• We should list contact information of scientist and eco-station manager to promote discussions

Long-term:

• Aside from GBIF, we should also look into other public data (from state agencies)
• Other sources: iNaturalist, ebird, IDBio
• We could also allow citizens to submit their observations (But we should label the data source, either from scientist or from citizen)