After recently making a trip to Puerto Rico that was primarily focused on bird watching, I decided to write a blog post to pass on some of what we learned. Much of the information that we got from books or the Internet was outdated or incorrect, so hopefully this post will help others to have an easier time finding good places to bird there.
Birding in Puerto Rico
QT Py RP2040 workshop
I’m really excited to be working with Vanderbilt Science and Engineering librarian Francisco Juarez to develop a workshop series to teach participants to program the QT Py RP2040 microcontroller using CircuitPython.
VanderBot 1.9 supports somevalue
One of the issues I discussed at my recent talk in the Art in Context: Identity, Ethics, and Insight symposium was the problem of representing anonymous artists in knowledge graphs. The solution that the Wikidata community has accepted is to associate a P170 (creator) claim with a somevalue snak having a P3831 (object has role) qualifier value of Q4233718 (anonymous). In RDF, this corresponds to a blank node and Wikidata claims using somevalue are represented by blank nodes in the Query Service.
Optimizing Wordle guesses
I’ve recently started playing the viral word game “Wordle”. After numerous discussions among family members about guessing strategy, I decided to spend some time over the holiday weekend writing a Python script to play with different guessing algorithms and strategies.
IIIF implementation
In connection with uploading files to Wikimedia Commons as part of our WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, I’ve been working on the details of uploading images to the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Cantaloupe International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) server and providing IIIF manifests to describe them.
Latest Posts
Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel
In May 2023, I finished reading all 71 of the winners of the the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. There were some fantastic books on that list and some real duds.
Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published
The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.
Camtrap DP paper published
Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.