The BKH
New level of services for integrating FAIR data
The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, or the BKH, is the main product of the aforementioned BiCIKL (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) project, which sets out to interlink biodiversity research infrastructures to provide unprecedented data access across the datacycle, from the time it is generated to its publication. The BKH thus serves as a knowledge broker for access to data, and associated tools and services, made available through integration of information coming from multiple and varied research infrastructures that until now were operating in isolation. BKH provides a completely new level of services at the disposal of the researchers, including enabled access to FAIR data at any stage of the research cycle. These services also open the future generation approach to harvesting, liberating, accessing and re-using data from the biodiversity and life sciences literature, from specimen and sample collections, from genomic sequences and taxonomic units, for anybody, anytime and from anywhere.
In a nutshell, as a BKH user you get unrestricted access to data, tools and services currently only partly accessible via scattered locations on the web. Moreover, by using advanced text and data mining tools, BKH opens for the first time a vast corpus of inaccessible data and knowledge previously ‘imprisoned’ in publications.
It must be noted that BKH does not provide its own services. Its main aim is to support a new emerging community of users of interlinked corpora of data, services and knowledge across the entire biodiversity research cycle, from collecting specimens to final publications and conversion of these into a biodiversity knowledge graph (see Figure 1, Copas and Miller, 2022[i]).
BKH has a special focus on literature by creating novel data mining and annotation tools and workflows to extract and compile the huge, precious data from millions of paper or PDF pages. Data mining, however, is a costly process. We can save the huge effort of data processing from PDFs or paper in the future by developing innovative, XML-based publishing workflows that directly export data to a common data pool, on the date of publication.
BKH users can:
• Explore who stores and shares data by organisation type
• Explore who stores and shares data by data domain
• Explore liked data services
BKH offers the opportunity to graphicaly represent the available information through the use of an advanced Network Analysis Tool.
[i] Copas, K. & Miller, J. (2022). Relational network graph for the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH). Deliverable D2.1 EU Horizon 2020 BiCIKL Project, Grant Agreement No 101007492.