Now, a social networking tool for natural historians

Washington, November 10 (ANI): Researchers at London's Natural History Museum have created a social networking tool called 'Scratchpads' where natural historians can get together and share their data.

Vincent Smith, Simon Rycroft, David Roberts and colleagues created the data-publishing framework for groups of people to create their own natural history-based social networks.

Users create a virtual workbench to study aspects of an organism much as Darwin did during his lifetime, and anyone can get involved.

To date, the system serves over 1100 registered users across 100 sites, spanning academic, amateur and citizen-science audiences.

Users have generated over 130,000 content nodes in the first two years.

"Scratchpads is emblematic of the kinds of biodiversity informatics approaches that are being developed to help better meet the timeless and ever-growing challenges of biological data curation," said Neil Sarkar assistant Professor and Director of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Vermont in the USA.

The Scratchpads infrastructure combines databases, network protocols and computational services to bring people, information and computational tools together to perform and publish natural history.

Specialist sites on fish, amphibians, trees and so on do exist.

But natural history is known for its diverse approaches and researchers with widely differing views and contexts.

Electronic data systems tend to offer just one way to represent data, which can alienate many potential contributors.

In Scratchpads, the user-created workbenches mean that natural historians can gather, organise and share their data themselves, for example picking their own biological classification systems and incorporating data from other platforms such as Encyclopaedia of Life.

"Our goal was to build a system that could motivate individual researchers in the generation, management and dissemination of their own data for their own needs, while empowering a wider constituent of potential users who are free to repurpose this information for other uses," said Vincent Smith.

The researchers hope Scratchpads will prevent natural history data from being marginalized in the "electronic ghetto" of publishers' websites, or worse still never being published at all.

Making better connections between these data also stands to boost natural history's image in the wider scientific community.

The service may also provide a template for use in other disciplines too. (ANI)