OpenBiodiv

The OpenBiodiv project aka "The Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System" is a project that I lead as a Marie Curie PhD student (2016–2019) at Pensoft Publishers, co-hosted at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Pensoft is a publisher of academic research papers, primarily in the area of biodiversity, and the idea of the project is to develop a theoretical framework (ontology, text miners), and a software system implementing this theoretical framework to extract knowledge from published articles and store this knowledge in an intelligent database for later retrieval. At the helm of this project I was responsible for managing all of these aspects and made key contributions both to theory and to implementation. I lead the creation of the OpenBiodiv-O ontology and the first version of the text extractors and other software components behind the knowledge-base. My primary focuses during this time were to develop a strong vision for the project and to create the minimal viable product. This included research in knowledge representation, developing the software architecture and leading the programming effort together with Pensoft's programmers, co-authoring papers, writing various reports for the EU, managing budgets, and going to and organizing conferences.

OpenBiodiv continues to be an interest of mine, as I believe its architecture of grounding knowledge about biodiversity in scientific truth may work well with newer advances in neural language processing.

References

Feel free to contact:

• Lyubomir Penev, CEO of Pensoft, academic advisor
• Kiril Simov, professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, co-advisor
• Pavel Stoev, director of the Bulgarian Natural History Museum, co-advisor