One would have thought we’re probably not that far away from completing the Catalogue of Life, this vast encyclopedia of all animal and plant species, right? Not even close! Even though bio-taxonomists have tried for centuries to systematically document life, they couldn’t even imagine the complications these dark ages of digital information brought to their noble cause. Apparently, chameleons, spiders, and big cats don’t only hide in nature, but also behind pay-walled publications and badly scanned 18th-century manuscripts. Millions of figures, taxonomic descriptions, and collected materials end up lost, destroyed, and undiscoverable to the research community.
This is a story of how Plazi, a non-profit association for bio-taxonomic literature, took up the task to liberate life from these PDF cages, give it a FAIR chance, and with the help of Zenodo put a PID on it and provide a safe and sustainable home. It is also a story on how, similar to wildlife, even data can disguise itself inside papers but eventually using the power of PIDs join the tree of life and make it bloom. We’ll explore what these fantastic PIDs look like, and how we make it possible for anybody to find them even in the darkest corners of tropical rainforests and harsh deserts.
How would you run the session to support the spirit of PIDapalooza as a laid-back, welcoming, energetic and exciting meeting, and ensure at least 10 minutes of your session are used to interact with the audience?
As the audience starts to get familiar with the inner workings of bio-taxonomy and the metadata and descriptions of new species, we’ll proceed with introducing an interactive game of worldwide hide-and-seek with some fantastic beasts such as the Jackalope, the Wolpertinger, Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and others. After some live cataloging of these peculiar “species”, we’ll demonstrate how their metadata descriptions are crucial to building our own mythical book of life and share it with our community.
