Project Description |
Corresponding author: Jonathan M. Jeschke ( jonathan.jeschke@fu-berlin.de ) Academic editor: Joana Vicente
© 2021 Jonathan M. Jeschke, Tina Heger, Peter Kraker, Maxi Schramm, Christopher Kittel, Daniel Mietchen.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Jeschke JM, Heger T, Kraker P, Schramm M, Kittel C, Mietchen D (2021) Towards an open, zoomable atlas for invasion science and beyond. NeoBiota 68: 5-18. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.68.66685
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Biological invasions are on the rise, and their global impacts on ecosystems, economies and human health are a major challenge. Invasion science is critical to mitigate invader impacts, yet due to the strong increase of data and information in this area, it has become difficult to acquire and maintain an overview of the field. As a result, existing evidence is often not found, knowledge is too rarely transferred to practice, and research is sometimes conducted in pursuit of dead ends. We propose to address these challenges by developing an interactive atlas of invasion science that can be extended to other disciplines in the future. This online portal, which we aim to create in the course of the project described here, will be an evolving knowledge resource and open for anyone to use, including researchers, citizen scientists, practitioners and policy makers. Users will be able to zoom into the major research questions and hypotheses of invasion science, which are connected to the relevant studies published in the field and, if available, the underlying raw data. The portal will apply cutting-edge visualization techniques, artificial intelligence and novel methods for knowledge synthesis.
hierarchy-of-hypotheses (HoH) approach, hypothesis networks, interactive knowledge discovery, invasive alien species, invasion biology, Open Knowledge Maps, open science, Wikidata
The number of non-native species has been strongly increasing over time worldwide, and there is currently no sign that this trend is going to stop (
However, due to an exponential increase of data and information in invasion science, it has become difficult to acquire and maintain an overview of the field (
Similar challenges can be observed for many other research fields (
Along these lines, the science philosopher Philip Kitcher wrote in his book “Science in a democratic society”: “Even when informed and well-intentioned scientists try to think broadly about research options, their discussions suffer from the absence of a synthetic vision. Instead of pitting one partial perspective against another, it would be preferable to create a space in which the entire range of our inquiries could be soberly appraised. We would do well to have an institution for the construction and constant revision of an atlas of scientific significance” (p. 127 in
Existing tools to explore the scientific literature have key drawbacks. Both Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus are large literature databases behind a paywall, thus only accessible to researchers at institutions with libraries that are both financially able and willing to cover hefty subscription fees. The exact amount of these fees varies according to the size of the subscribing institution. For example, the Texas A&M University Libraries paid in 2019 ca. US$ 212,000 for the Web of Science and ca. US$ 140,000 for Scopus (
The freely searchable literature database Google Scholar is probably the tool used by most researchers without access to either the Web of Science or Scopus. Google Scholar is far from an ideal research tool, though. It has largely remained unchanged since its launch in 2004. Its search results are not reproducible by others, which is a problem for scientists, for example when they aim to perform a systematic literature review. Search hits in Google Scholar are created by a black-box algorithm that possibly returns different results depending on where and with which user profile a search was done. Furthermore, Google Scholar returns a list of possibly relevant papers in text form, but such a format does not allow users to grasp, and thus take advantage of, the many papers that are often available for a given scientific topic or search string.
A visual navigation tool would be much more powerful for taking advantage of Big Data (
An open database that could possibly be used by Open Knowledge Maps is the open-source linked data system Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page;
Another challenge of existing approaches for exploring scientific publications is that they do not link these to the big research questions, concepts and hypotheses of research fields. The novel hierarchy-of-hypotheses (HoH) approach allows to do so (
We aim to develop a prototype of a unique interactive atlas of invasion science that can be extended to other disciplines in the future. This interactive knowledge portal will (a) build on the strengths of Open Knowledge Maps in organizing and visualizing scientific knowledge, (b) connect it to Wikidata and (c) be conceptually based on the HoH approach. The portal will also have some similarities to e.g. Google Maps in that it is a zoomable navigation tool. In our case, users will be able to zoom into the field’s conceptual structure, its big and smaller research questions, its major hypotheses and more specific operational hypotheses. All of these are connected to the relevant studies published in the field and, if available, the underlying raw data. It will be an openly accessible web portal providing FAIR open data (
The working title of the proposed knowledge portal is enKORE: EvolviNg KnOwledge Resource. enKORE will be an interactive atlas of up-to-date knowledge that “connects the dots”. It will have the following key features:
The web portal will improve shared understanding within and across disciplinary contexts, increase collaboration and enable easier knowledge transfer to education and practice. Our vision is that it will foster theory-building within the discipline, and at the same time allow transfer of knowledge to other parts of society. The approach developed in this project can be easily transferred to other fields, extending its benefits far beyond invasion science, thus harnessing the potential of increased digitization to improve effectiveness and efficiency of global research.
Proposed hierarchical structure of enKORE that will allow for an interactive and zoomable visualization of invasion science. enKORE will allow users to structure research done in biological invasions according to: (a) focal research questions (examples shown on top of the figure), (b) hypotheses addressing (some of) these questions (examples shown for one research question, see
These features will be developed in five work packages: (WP1) conceptual classification system integrating research questions and invasion hypotheses; (WP2) interactive evidence synthesis; (WP3) semantic data structures based on WP1 that will automatically ingest the literature into Wikidata; (WP4) engaging with the research and Wiki community; and (WP5) data-driven visualization techniques based on artificial intelligence (Fig.
Scheme of the five work packages (WPs) and how they interrelate. Please see main text for details.
This work package will be based on the hierarchy-of-hypotheses approach and hypothesis networks (see above for references). The website hi-knowledge.org (https://hi-knowledge.org) is a first attempt to combine these two approaches, as it features a zoomable (hierarchically structured) hypothesis network. However, it only includes 12 hypotheses in the field of invasion science, whereas
A core task of WP1 will thus be to create, based on our preliminary work, a conceptual classification system in which all research studies on biological invasions can be integrated. We will construct a hierarchical network of research questions in which major invasion hypotheses (see
The >1100 publications included in
In addition to research questions and hypotheses, research studies on biological invasions can also be structured according to other factors, such as taxonomic groups (given as scientific names and in several languages), regions in which a study was performed, authors or groups of authors (cf.
The website hi-knowledge.org (https://hi-knowledge.org) does not only present a hierarchical network of invasion hypotheses, but also shows the level of empirical support for hypotheses according to published literature. In WP2, we will integrate this information into the new web portal enKORE. This will be done for the >1100 publications included in
The information on the level of evidence for or against major hypotheses in invasion science summarized in hi-knowledge.org has been manually extracted from the literature. Integration of additional publications and continuous updates will only be possible with the help of novel approaches including automated methods. A second work step in WP2 will therefore be to review existing approaches, e.g. for the extraction of the respective information from publications, and assess options for a future integration of respective tools in enKORE. Existing contacts with experts working on developing such tools will be very useful in this context, for example the teams behind the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG,
In WP3, we will build semantic data structures – also known as knowledge graphs – in Wikidata that are based on persistent identifiers for publications, authors, research questions, hypotheses and the relationships between them, focal non-native species, study locations, research methods etc. (Fig.
It will be critical that enKORE will be user friendly and that we engage with the research community, citizen scientists, the Wiki community and other stakeholders, such as managers, teachers, policy makers and science journalists. We will do this through workshops and online videos, including a tutorial, in which we explain both the benefits of using enKORE and how it can be used. Wikidata’s multilinguality facilitates collaborations of people who do not share a common language, which allows to bring professional researchers together with citizen scientists from around the world, e.g. for specific regions or taxa or from platforms like iNaturalist that are increasingly being integrated with Wikidata. In the future when enKORE will grow beyond invasion science, we will first target related fields in biodiversity science, so that the community will grow in parallel with enKORE’s coverage. The enKORE tool itself will, at least initially, only be available in English, but multilinguality will be helpful for future extensions.
For the current project, we aim to organize two large workshops to engage with researchers, the Wiki community and other stakeholders. In these workshops, we will introduce the tools we propose to develop, discover user demands, conduct user tests including options for data curation, and receive feedback. To foster our engagement with user groups, we will additionally develop and distribute a demo and promotion video plus a tutorial in several languages (at least English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese).
This engagement with user groups also serves an additional purpose. As outlined in WP1 above, we have already manually classified more than 1100 publications in the field of invasion science and plan to use this classification to train the algorithm developed in WP3. However, the algorithm will not be perfect and will indeed make classification mistakes. What it will do is provide a rough classification of publications in the field of invasion science. It will be critical that these automated classifications are checked by experts and, if necessary, corrected. We will invite users to provide these corrections online and will use them to further improve the algorithm.
We are confident that researchers will be highly interested in enKORE due to its novel features, particularly because the exact nature of these features will be specified by the users themselves. This co-design element of the project will be possible thanks to the workshops and online channels. In addition, researchers will have an interest that their publications are correctly included in the database, hence invasion scientists will have an incentive to curate their data and improve the algorithm-based classifications where necessary.
In WP5, we will develop visualizations and visual search capabilities to enable exploration and discovery of the database developed in WPs 1–3. To create dynamic, two-dimensional representations of the field of invasion science, we will merge machine learning and natural language processing with symbolic reasoning enabled by the semantic data structures (cf. WP 3; for further information about the approach, see
The visualizations will be based on design concepts for different types of knowledge maps:
These design concepts will be refined in collaboration with the research and Wiki community as part of the workshops we will organize in WP4. We will carry out two user tests:
The data-driven visualizations will be implemented in our award-winning knowledge mapping framework Head Start, and will be made available open source during the development phase.
This ambitious project aims to take important steps towards an open and interactive atlas of knowledge, in invasion biology and beyond. If you are interested in contributing to it in one way or another, then please do not hesitate to contact us. We invite contributions by interested individuals and organizations with a focus on invasion science or other disciplines. We have started to think more deeply about applications in restoration and urban ecology as well as in freshwater biodiversity research, and also look forward to collaborations in these and other research fields. Strengthening connections to portals with citizen science data (e.g. iNaturalist) will also be very useful, and initiatives like Wikidata’s WikiProject Biodiversity can help with this.
The project outlined here is scheduled to run from September 2021 to February 2024. Beyond this time period, it will be important to continue improving the atlas of knowledge, so that it will thrive and its underlying technology remains state of the art. The sustainability of such online tools is critical, hence we are aiming to secure long-term support for the atlas of knowledge. To reach this goal, we will not only apply for future grants: the sustainability of the atlas will also be supported by its integration with Wikidata right from the beginning, as it is part of the Wikipedia ecosystem that has a strong and sustainable community-based funding model centered around small donations from millions of users each year.
We are grateful to Christopher Schwarzkopf and Sarah Behrens from Wikimedia Deutschland for bringing us together as a team and providing valuable suggestions, to the VolkswagenStiftung for funding this project (grant number 97 863) and to Elizabete Marchante and anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments.