The CSA/NBII Biocomplexity Thesaurus: Current Initiatives, Future Directions

1. The CSA/NBII Biocomplexity Thesaurus: Current Initiatives, Future Directions Lisa Zolly NBII Program Office US Geological Survey CENDI Terminologies Workshop Washington, DC 16 September 2004

2. CSA – NBII Partnership • CSA (formerly Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) is one of the major indexers and abstractors of biological and environmental literature. • CSA became the NBII’s “Knowledge Integration Node” in FY2001. • Projects include the delivery of indexed literature citations and Web resources; the forthcoming sustainability science ejournal; and the biocomplexity thesaurus

3. Genesis of the Biocomplexity Thesaurus • CSA had developed a number of smaller, discipline- specific thesauri over the last several decades to support I&A work • CSA determined that these thesauri needed to be merged and reconciled to support expanding business practices • NBII had partnered with the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) in the mid-1990s to jointly develop a thesaurus • Resulting CERES/NBII Thesaurus was concise and useful; however, by FY2001, it was no longer comprehensive enough to cover the scope of the NBII’s regional and thematic nodes

5. CSA Life Sciences Thesaurus CSA Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Thesaurus CSA Sociological Thesaurus CERES/NBII Thesaurus CSA Ecotourism Thesaurus CSA Pollution Thesaurus Biocomplexity Thesaurus

6. Thesaurus Development • Dr. Jessica Milstead performed the reconciliation and integration of terminologies using MultiTes • ~9500 terms • Dr. Milstead continues to provide project support for upgrades and additions to the Biocomplexity Thesaurus • NBII Nodes can recommend new terms for inclusion via a portlet on the NBII’s portal-based Intranet • Anticipated thematic expansion areas for the Biocomplexity Thesaurus include: • Forestry • Fire ecology and management • Wildlife diseases

7. Current NBII Implementations • Publicly available for term searching at thesaurus.nbii.gov • Rotated index to be made available shortly

8. Current NBII Implementations • BT, NT, RT • Use and use for • Scope notes

9. All electronic data and information resources indexed using common standards, based on Dublin Core Current NBII Implementations: Resource Indexing

10. Current NBII Implementations: Web Site Content

11. Current NBII Implementations: Portal Content

12. Current NBII Implementations: Portal Content

13. Expertise categories based upon terms in Biocomplexity Thesaurus Current NBII Implementations: Expertise Systems

14. Current NBII Implementations: Literature Citations CSA delivers citations from its Internet Database Service through the NBII and WDC portals; thesaurus terms drive system selection of records from the database

15. Current NBII Implementations: NBII Image Gallery • Images are catalogued using the same cataloguing tool used for Web resources • Scripts sort images to folders based upon keywords from the Biocomplexity Thesaurus and gazetteers

16. Current NBII Implementations: NBII Image Gallery

17. Current NBII Implementations: Conference Announcments

18. Current NBII Prototypes: Thesaurus-aided Searching Within the My.NBII Portal (Intranet) • The My.nbii.gov portal uses the Plumtree portal server to provide Intranet functionalities within the NBII’s distributed partnership network • Much of the content of the public NBII node sites is also available to any public user of my.nbii.gov – no login is required to gain access to public NBII resources

19. Current NBII Prototypes: Thesaurus-aided Searching Within the My.NBII Portal (Intranet) • Plumtree technology allows us to “plug in” our Biocomplexity Thesaurus to the portal’s basic Search functionality • The Thesaurus operates behind the scenes • A user’s entry level term (e.g. invasive species) is given a rank of 1.0; exact term matches will display first in search results • NT=.75 • RT=.50 • BT=.25

20. Portal is searching these term relationships, weighting the results for all terms, sorting by weighting (“relevance”)

21. If the user chooses the “Advanced Search” option to search the portal, only those documents matching the query term are included in the results, producing a smaller results set

22. Future Directions for the Biocomplexity Thesaurus • NBII is in the process of converting the main NBII gateway to a portal-driven “Web site.” • The portal will “look” like a Web site, but act like a portal, with advanced functionalities for resource metadata, searching, and data mining. • The NBII Program Office is working with Plumtree developers to make the thesaurus-facilitated searching more transparent to end-users, so they can choose to opt-in or opt-out of this kind of search, depending upon their understanding of both the biological issue at hand and their particular information need.

23. Future Directions for the Biocomplexity Thesaurus • NBII has many strong partnerships with international data-sharing efforts, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN). • These groups have expressed a strong desire to leverage the tools and resources developed by the NBII to make data and information more visible and available within their own communities, as well as to the world community. • NBII is exploring ways to make available resources such as our Web Resources Cataloguing Tool, Image Library, and Biocomplexity Thesaurus for information managers and the communities they serve, in their native languages. • Spanish, Portuguese, and French are likely starting points • NBII is also participating in the UNEP EcoInformatics Working Group, which is exploring this issue

24. Thank You Lisa Zolly NBII Knowledge Manager Lisa_zolly@usgs.gov 703.648.4277