Workshop “Text mining and semantic search on biodiversity literature with BIOfid” @ GZG, 8th September 2020

Christine Driller, Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Markus Koch, Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Giuseppe Abrami, Text Technology Lab, Goethe University Frankfurt
Manuel Stoeckel, Text Technology Lab, Goethe University Frankfurt
Gerwin Kasperek, University Library J.C. Senckenberg

Historical data on species distributions are becoming increasingly important as biodiversity continues to decline. The Specialised Information Service for Biodiversity Research (BIOfid) provides digital access to pertinent literature with a focus on printed German periodicals and books of the 20th century. However, part of BIOfid‘s text corpus also goes back to the 19th century and beyond. With regard to the range of organisms, we initially concentrate on vascular plants, birds, as well as moths and butterflies. Scientific literature on the ecology and taxonomy of soil organisms will be included in the second project phase funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

To make research-relevant data not only digitally available but also extractable, Natural Language Processing and text mining tools as well as a semantic search engine are developed. In the course of this workshop, we will give theoretical and practical introduction to these methods. Based on BIOfid´s tools participants will analyse digital texts, extract data and explore them.

The BIOfid-portal is still in its trial phase. We therefore welcome feedback and suggestions of the participants for further development, technical improvement, and adaptation to specific user requirements.

Own laptop and Wifi-access (Eduroam or BayernWLAN are provided) are required for the practical part.