Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The Natural History Museum launches their data portal

XVlUOuC5The Natural History Museum has released their data portal (http://data.nhm.ac.uk/). As of now it contains 2,439,827 of the Museum's 80 million specimens, so it's still early days. I gather that soon this data will also appear in GBIF, ending the unfortunate situation where data from one of the premier natural history collections in the world was conspicuous by its absence.

I've not had a chance to explore it in much detail, but one thing I'm keen to do is see whether I can link citations of NHM specimens in the literature (e.g., articles in BioStor) with records in the NHM portal. Being able to dip this would enable all sorts of cool things, such as being able to track what researchers have said about particular specimens, as well as develop citation metrics for the collection.

Nhmportal