 I'm a Martin Kalpatvik from the Smithsonian Institution and also the Biodiversity Heritage Library. And I just want to sort of take a step back from astrophysics. And it's good following my colleague Alberto because I don't know anything about astrophysics. And this map is done from Apple Maps. So it's really not an accurate representation of where we are within the Milky Way. It's just used for illustrative purposes. So I'm going to sort of take it all back down to our little planet Earth, the blue marble, and sort of talk about life on Earth in a bit and sort of how we can deal with that within an annotation context as we're all carbon-based life forms. So one of the key things as we think about annotation and description of the life on Earth and taxonomic description is a big problem that we've had for the past 250-plus years which is what's something we call the taxonomic impediment within the community. And the basic problem here is that we've collected all of this information over time. We've filed it in file cabinets, in books, and in huge specimen collections in our large natural history and botanical garden collections where we literally have hundreds of millions of specimens that have been collected over the years. The problem is none of this is linked together. The data is often locked up in analog sources. How do we share those resources? How do we share the commentary, the annotations that have occurred on all of these types of material over those years in order to better understand what we have on the planet Earth and what we're losing? So one of the ways we thought we could solve this problem about 2005 or so is we were thinking of something called the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Charles Darwin back in the mid-19th century said that really natural sciences can't be carried out without access to a large natural history collection. And what we thought we could do is for solving that taxonomic impediment to make a small dent in it with that literature portion, the published portions of the material. So in about 2005, 2006, what was then 10 natural history and botanical garden libraries came together to form the BHL, as we call it. We're now up to 15 members, the Library of Congress being our most recent member that just joined a couple weeks ago. And you can see we have a fairly wide representation from those large collections. From the start, the BHL was really an interesting social experiment because we brought together different communities. We brought together technology, library, and science. Thanks to my colleague Chris Freeland, who was then at the Missouri Botanical Garden. We really made BHL not just another digital library project, but something that really integrated technology and science right from the beginning in order to bring these types of things together. The BHL idea caught on globally. So in addition to the 15 US-UK partners, in the past few years we've added global nodes, the first in Europe, the BHL Europe, China, Billy Tech, Alexandria in Egypt, Brazil, Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia, and launching on April 15th will be the BHL Africa Consortium headed by Sanby in South Africa and Kenya, and that will launch officially on, as I said, April 15th. And here's where we are. So what we have to annotate is about 40 million pages. And again, we'd like to give a shout out to Brewster, who's not here, who's helped us from the very beginning in terms of actually digitizing that content and making it freely and openly and widely available. Also, though, we've expanded beyond just the literature. So within those 40 plus million pages are locked up in incredible illustrations that depict what those creatures and organisms look like at the time. So what we've been doing is pulling those images out of the context of the books. Right now we're putting up on Flickr, Wikimedia Commons. Right now it's a little bit of a hand process, but we have received an NEH grant to actually do an algorithmic search through the contents. And then we can push out where we're thinking is two to three million illustrations of organisms that can then, again, flow into this whole annotation stream. Right now in Flickr, we have a very active tagging community. So in addition to just regular tags, we also use the Flickr machine tag option. And so those images can then be through APIs pulled into different systems. For instance, the Encyclopedia of Life pulls in all the images that get machine tags with an organism, and then they can go within that Encyclopedia of Life platform for further context. We've also worked with Apple to sort of pull out portions of the highlights of VHL in turn and to put them into iTunes U. So again, there's a further place where people can interact with the content. Here's our portal, which humans can look at, which actually this new version, thanks to our Australian team, just launched last, earlier in March. But increasingly, a large number of our use comes from other machines. So again, systems like Tropicos at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Encyclopedia of Life, all of those types of systems and tools pull in this content. So it's not just annotation that needs to occur within our own platform in that own silo, but the annotations would need to move between the different systems where this content begins to flow around the info sphere. So a quick taxonomic lesson. Kings play chess on fine-grain sand. Alice in Wonderland has been a bit of a theme of notice in a lot of people's slides. As we know, Alice played chess in the Wonderland books, and she played with do-dos amongst other people and things. Everyone recognized Kings play chess on fine-grain sand, which is, of course, Kingdom fine-glass order. So here's our sort of basis of annotation within our BHL context in terms of finding information. And there we go. Who do we have to thank for this? We call it LDOT in the botany world, Linnaeus in the zoology world. I like to call him 345-947-30 in the bi-ass world. But to the rest of you, he's probably better known as Carl von Linnae, or Linnaeus. He is the father of the binomial taxonomic system, and he's the one that gave us the concepts of homo sapiens, the amaze, et cetera. So the two landmark volumes of where he defined this concept are species plantarum, which is for plants, 1753. So we're celebrating the 260th anniversary, and then sustainment mature where he added the rest of the animal and atyp mineral kingdoms. But there's a problem with this, because the different types of ways that names occur as people change the names over the time, it causes a problem when you start to annotate these texts. So here is the sperm whale, as described by Linnaeus in the early editions. The top name is Visitor Cadodon, and then the lower name is Visitor Macrocephalus. These, at the time, Linnaeus thought were two separate species, so he described them in two separate ways. What we found out, though, in around 1844 is that actually these are actually the same species that he described just due to the time and the tools he had at hand, the specimens that he was looking at, third or fourth hand. So actually that's one name. So one of our colleagues in Scotland, Rod Page, has actually developed a tool where we can actually trace, using the biodiversity heritage literature, the way that names have changed in usage over the time. So what you can see is actually that Cadodon has become the more, is now the accepted name and is used more commonly, where its Macrocephalus has declined over the time as people start to use the new name. So what happens is lumping and splitting. You lump old species together, you split species apart, species names, name strings, and you get all of these types of problems. And this causes a very difficult problem when you're talking about annotation in the print world. This is a book by George Gray, a list of generative species. It's actually Spencer Baird, who is the Smithsonian's second secretary and person who really created the Smithsonian as a museum, his personal copy. He was an ornithologist, and he really liked to get things right. So here we have the fully annotated copy of the Gray's book on birds, and there's a little note there that explains exactly how it's been annotated. So Baird and a guy named Strickland went through and revised everything, and there's annotations on those species everywhere on every page. And this is an entire rewrite of the book. The annotations create a brand new book on top of this that describe these various bird species. And then here's just sort of a quick little example where we can actually see this one on genus and species that have been totally renamed, changed by the person who actually described them, et cetera, et cetera. So it's basically an entire, the annotations become a brand new book. Here's another friend of ours, known to the botanists as Darwin, and again to me as 27063124, Charles Darwin. Darwin was an inveterate annotator. This is actually a holograph manuscript from the origin of species that we have at the Smithsonian. And as Darwin was working on all of his publications, he annotated his entire library. One of the projects we developed as part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library was actually to digitize Darwin's library and then working with the team at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Cambridge University to actually capture all of those annotations within our BHL context. Again, thanks to Chris Freeland and Mike Lichtenberg, our programmer at Missouri, who really brought what was originally going to be a paper-based print project and turned it into an online annotation display tool. So again, here you can see Darwin's lightly pencil note. I don't know if you can quite see there, but actually in the annotation display tool, it actually says this was written in pale pencil. So you know exactly how Darwin is doing that. And then it gives Darwin's annotation and you can sort of explore through that. And here's just another example of one of Darwin's annotations. So within this, you can recreate, sort of by going backwards, how Darwin came to the ideas and explorations that led to origin of species as well as other volumes. Another example is from a project we did at the Smithsonian called the Bialogist Centrale Americana, which is now part of the BHL project. And one of the things we did was an experiment was how all the types of concepts within a taxonomic description you could pull out that would need annotations. We didn't call annotations in 2004 when we started this, but it was sort of an explosion of the text. So in any taxonomic description, you can really micro-citate practically every character that becomes suitable for annotation as the specimens move around, as they're re-described, as they're lumped and split and geographically redetermined. So again, one small step in this taxonomic impediment solution is this creation of a digital library of this element. Another example, though, is that whole element of the specimens and the other stuff. So again, here's a specimen from the U.S. Exploring Expedition. This was the founding collection of the Smithsonian. This is a botanical specimen. That botanical specimen is then published in a book. It's illustrated in that book. I did get this circle of the specimen book and illustration. Chris Freel and I were talking last night, and he wanted to also point out that it's very important all of the types of annotations that occur on the specimens themselves. So here's an example from the Missouri Botanical Garden from a mid-19th century Engelman Exploration Expedition. You can see on the plant specimen there's a whole bunch of stuff which we can pull up closer. And all of these labels on this botanical specimen are annotations that have occurred over the years to re-describe the species and clarify where and what it actually is. So what we have now is sort of this element of places where we can annotate, but how do we actually do it? So one of the reasons for me coming to this meeting is actually to learn the types of tools that we might implement on these platforms in order to bring some of these things together. So we can take something, for instance, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, integrate it within the EOL, the Psychopathy of Life tool, and then even better, take it back into Wikipedia where people can do other types of things within Wikipedia to work on that species and then bring that all together. And the key thing there, I think, is the annotation element because that's what we really need is for the citizen science component, the citizen taxonomist to help bring all of these things together in different ways. That's the Biodiversity Heritage Library's wish list on annotation. Thank you.