Summary
Overview
Two things:
- QuestaGame mobile application, the original app to connect people to nature.
- Seeing the GBIF backbone dataset for the first time, the largest aggregated dataset containing all known species and taxa to humanity.
The contestant thought that there must be a better way to display the data than a giant TSV file because it’s just so rich in content, that more people should be able to benefit from it. They wanted to build a graph that connected every single taxon in an intuitive way and surface that to wider audiences. This hackathon, #MillionDollarChallenge was the perfect nudge to go and actually implement.
BioDex gamifies the experience of connecting to nature. With a scalable AI image classifier, players can snap images of nature, identify its species and display its properties in real-time. BioDex makes being outdoors a learning experience in itself.
Later on, that same player can look at the species they have caught in their own BioDex. Because we have ingested all 6.9M taxon nodes from GBIF into TigerGraph, they are then free to explore the relationships of their captured species to all other species in the taxon chain, learning about those too. BioDex challenges players to capture all initial 10,000 species. By joining guilds, players can achieve this goal collectively. In the process, they are able to gain mastery through capturing novel species, traversing diverse taxa and engaging with the community.
With players gathering global sightings, we can aggregate this data to better gauge global biodiversity levels, and further understand the movements and distribution of species. Some players may even help discover new species altogether! By providing value to experts and researchers, we can include them in our community, meaning players get the opportunity to have their sightings verified by world-class experts.
