Expeditia.info

Wikidata is an open knowledge base used to describe entities in a structured way. Since its inception in 2012, a myriad of entries on multiple fields have been created by the community. Research Expeditions can be described with several properties indicating important information about them, such as start time, end time, start point, destination point, itinerary (via), participants, etc. A web application was built to query wikidata for research expeditions details and display itineraries on a map, making a visualisation of the trip: https://www.expeditia.info. Plus, it also queries GBIF (www.gbif.org) to get information about natural history specimens that were collected during the expedition, and display on the map the point where they were collected, along with images of the specimens and its basic information. The platform Bionomia (www.bionomia.net) is used as a broker to know the specimens collected by expedition participants that were collected between the expedition dates. The current state of the tool is “proof of concept”, but more developments are planned to enhance the efficiency of data retrieval and increase de amount of data displayed.