Investigating taxonomic issues on GBIF.org

Data Publishing
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The next technical support hour for GBIF nodes will be on February 5th, 2025, at 4 pm CET, and the topic is investigating taxonomic issues on GBIF.org.

The taxonomy of the records published to GBIF is matched to GBIF’s taxonomic backbone to normalize the data and make records easier to find for GBIF data users. This means that publishers sometimes share a taxon name that is changed when appearing on GBIF.org. For example, a beetle record appears as a butterfly record, or the authorship is changed.

We will show examples of how the taxonomy is changed, how to investigate where the source of the change comes from, and how you can provide feedback directly to the source or GBIF helpdesk.

We will be happy to answer any question relating or not to the topic. Please feel free to post questions in advance in this thread or write to helpdesk@gbif.org.

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Greetings @cecsve,

Looking forward to this session! I’ve put it on the Species File Group calendar. I’m especially heartened to see the focus on being explicit about agency when you write:

… how [we] can provide feedback directly to the source OR GBIF

Hoping this is a trend, that is, a move toward a community best practice that includes thinking about our workflows, software, user interfaces, and networks that consider facilitating this type of interaction from the start. #roundtripping matters #agency #provenance #policy #standards #transparency #credit

Some questions that come to mind:

  1. How many taxonomy-related tickets does GBIF encounter in say, a week, or month, or year?
  2. How many can GBIF address directly? How many staff and how much time from GBIF staff is dedicated to these matters?
  3. What percentage of these issues need help from the experts who are providing these data?
  4. How often does it happen that the providers are not reachable or responsive? How can we all help to improve responsiveness (from UI to software and community development)?
  5. What changes could we / you suggest that are needed in other related taxonomic related resources with regard to making agency (more) possible and transparent?
  6. For names that need community work to improve them (or even provide them at all), might there be ways to call attention to these organismal groups (kindly, of course) and help convey these gaps to policy makers and funders for relevance to the bioeconomy?
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Thanks for the questions @Debbie! We will answer them to the best of our knowledge when we make a summary after the meeting. With the switch to the xRelease from Catalogue of Life as the new GBIF backbone, we expect that source updates will be integrated faster in the backbone and shown on GBIF.org.

We have a video from a previous session where Camila from COL explains the xRelease and process you may find relevant: Switching GBIF’s taxonomic backbone to the Catalogue of Life extended release (x-release).