People in the biodiversity knowledge graph and their roles in building the data connections we need

Slides presented in BOTANY 2023 Special Lecture: Supporting inclusive and sustainable research infrastructure for systematics (SISRIS) by connecting scientists and their specimens held on 26 July 2023 in Boise, Idaho. Abstract: Herbaria are connected to each other by intricate and deep-rooted social histories. A student trained at one collection moves on and eventually becomes the curator of another. A prolific amateur collector donates specimens to multiple herbaria over the course of their lifetime. Rival systematists wage a decades-long battle documented by annotations back-and-forth on specimen labels. Although 21st-century data management in herbaria has not prioritized information about the people associated with specimens, people are often a critical link to data beyond the basic specimen occurrence record. Capturing and sharing more data about the “who” of specimens can improve connections across institutions and individuals, augment local data records, and encourage expertise-sharing. Typically, data about people are digitized and managed individually by each herbarium or institution, or at best by a consortia of institutions using the same collections management system. Not only does this lead to redundant time spent, but it also results in isolated knowledge management. Shared knowledge management, in contrast, can improve knowledge completeness, raise the visibility of the work required to manage knowledge, and make data more accessible to the linked open data ecosphere. Ultimately, these benefits lead to improved discoverability for specimens by increasing their data connectivity in the biodiversity knowledge graph. Over the past few years, Wikidata has gained visibility in the biodiversity collections community as a centralized, accessible platform for working collaboratively to disambiguate entities, e.g., people associated with herbaria, and to mobilize information about them. In this way, Wikidata is a tool for shared knowledge management, and we can use it to support inclusive and sustainable research infrastructure. Such research infrastructure depends on social systems as much as on information systems for successful knowledge management. Wikidata also provides an established social system with its collaborative, community-oriented approach to curation. This approach may be initially uncomfortable to many herbarium professionals, but relinquishing total control over “our” data promotes inclusivity by recognizing that we may not be the ultimate authorities on every aspect of our collections data. This is especially true of data related to people, who are frequently important to domains other than herbaria. Even within the herbarium community, many individuals involved with collections are not fully acknowledged for their work or have been misrepresented, especially those who are women, non-White, and/or Indigenous. Tools like Wikidata offer the opportunity for data to be augmented and/or corrected, and for this work to be done in a shared knowledge management context that benefits all herbaria and specimens connected to an individual