Ozymandias: A biodiversity knowledge graph

Abstract

Enormous quantities of biodiversity data are being made available online, but much of this data remains isolated in their own silos. One approach to breaking these silos is to map local, often database-specific identifiers to shared global identifiers. This mapping can then be used to construct a knowledge graph, where entities such as taxa, publications, people, places, specimens, sequences, and institutions are all part of a single, shared knowledge space. Motivated by the 2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge I explore the feasibility of constructing a \"biodiversity knowledge graph\" for the Australian fauna. These steps involved in constructing the graph are described, and examples its application are discussed. A web interface to the knowledge graph (called \"Ozymandias\") is available at https://ozymandias-demo.herokuapp.com.