Finding a goldmine of natural
history illustrations within
BHL texts:
the Art of Life project
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
BHL Problem statement
– users want access to images, access to images is
limited
– How to broaden the audiences for BHL content?
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
What is Art of Life?
• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the
Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations
from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis
• Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities
• Runs May 2012-April 2014
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life
Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations
Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus
Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these
identified visual resources.
Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive
metadata for the illustrations
Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for
access and preservation
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Current status of Art of Life
• Development of the algorithms are complete. Running them
across entire BHL corpus now.
• Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations was
posted for public review http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb. In
process of converting to an application profile
• Classifier tool complete
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Algorithms
• Developed by folks at Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) Lab.
• Built 4 primary types:
–
–
–
–
ABBYY (87% accurate)
Contrast (88% accurate)
Color (.09% accurate)
Compression (9% accurate)
• Tested against a gold standard set of 100 books (40k pages)
• ABBYY and Contrast were chosen as most effective in finding
illustrations
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Interface designed for BHL to assess performance of
algorithms
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Interface developed to assign broad classes
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Art of Life Schema
Needs to support three objectives:
1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by
artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators
2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms
3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back
into BHL.
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Schema landscape review
– VRA Core 4.0 (art image community)
– LIDO (museum community)
– Dublin Core (Web community)
– Darwin Core (biodiversity community)
– Audubon Core (biodiversity community)
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS
red =required
Title
Type
Date
Copyright
Source
Agent
Subjects
Description
Inscription
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema
Title
Stictospiza formosa
Type
Paintings
Date
Publication: 1898
Agent
Description
Subjects
Inscriptions
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Author: Arthur G. Butler (1844-1925)
Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946)
A pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds
Birds, finches
Scientific name: Amandava formosa
Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green Munia
Accepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790)
bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa)
Source
Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and
Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage
Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895
Rights
Public domain
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
How will this project benefit the scientific
community?
•
•
•
Will provide access to content in BHL that has been largely hidden and difficult to
find. Functionality will be added to the BHL portal to allow searching for images by
species name, common names, subjects, and illustrators
Once the images are available and described in places like Flickr and Wikimedia
Commons they will become easily linked to and available in other biodiversityrelated platforms such as Wikispecies and EOL
Like the text content in BHL, most image content will fall under public domain and
be freely available for download and re-use so you can incorporate them into your
research and publications
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Art of Life team
PI
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Algorithm development
Ed Bachta, Charlie Moad, Kyle Jaebker, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Schema development
Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, Boulder
William Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden
Programming
Mike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden
Consultants
Doug Holland, Missouri Botanical Garden; Chris Freeland, Washington University
(former PI for Art of Life)
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
Interested? Here’s how you can help
• We welcome your feedback on the schema before its finalized!
http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb
• Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with
crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia
commons
• Spread the word about this free, rich resource of images
http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary and help us describe our
illustrations!
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project
For more info
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life
Contact
trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org
TDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy
Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical Garden
Art of Life project