Hi Knowledge offers quick and easy access to relevant information about invasion biology. | Graph: Hi Knowledge
Invasion biology investigates how the human-induced spread of organisms alters species communities, influences ecosystem functions and affects human health, culture and economics. The spread of invasive species is a global challenge for the conservation of biodiversity, and their management is often associated with high effort and costs. “Invasion biology is a dynamic research field. To keep pace with the growth in publications, researchers, students and also decision-makers need tools to find their way through the wealth of information and not overlook important evidence“, said IGB researcher Jonathan Jeschke, who also works at Freie Universität Berlin and co-founded Hi Knowledge together with IGB researcher Tina Heger.
At www.hi-knowledge.org, it takes just a few clicks to create knowledge maps defined by keywords that are linked to scientific publications. A new version of Hi Knowledge has now been launched, based on research projects funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Research Foundation. The literature database created by the team contains over 50,000 publications related to biological invasions. It can be used with the OKMaps Tool or Scholia. The target group are researchers, but also other stakeholders who want to get a quick and uncomplicated overview or an in-depth insight.
Service for young scientists
The Thesis-Starter-Tool can help students who are not yet knowledgeable in invasion biology, e.g. during initial literature research in the first phase of a doctoral thesis. After entering a text (e.g. an abstract of a paper on biological invasions), the tool provides a list of hypotheses with probabilities that allow to identify the most important invasion hypotheses addressed in this abstract. Further, the tool can highlight which text passages relate to a focal hypothesis.
Find and compare results more easily
Hi Knowlege has been linked to the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) to make publications and data easier to find and access, as well as improve their interoperability and reusability in accordance with the FAIR principles. ORKG is an open platform of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB). Scientists can enter their own papers and their machine-readable annotations there using smart templates. “The authors are the best people to tell us what their study and data are about. However, there is no standardised approach to summarise the essential characteristics of papers in a way that is machine-interpretable and interoperable. On our platform, this is now possible for publcations in invasion biology“, said Tina Heger, explaining the principle.
For the first time, the team also developed a classification scheme that structures the major themes, questions and hypotheses of invasion biology. In a next step, the team aims todevelop tools that are more strongly tailored to the needs of practitioners involved in the management of biological invasions. This development is being carried out together with researchers from other fields, allowing, for example, to take more advantage of the possibilities of artificial intelligence.
