CODATA India Workshop on Liberation, Extraction & Reuse of Data

Introduction

Liberating biodiversity data is key to advancing open and reusable science. This event highlights methods and tools for extracting data from literature and making it FAIR, interoperable, and ready for reuse. Bringing together scientists and researchers across the globe, this event fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange on extracting, structuring, and reusing biodiversity data.

This introduces participants to practical methods for extracting biodiversity data from scientific literature and converting it into machine-readable formats such as JATS XML. Through hands-on use of tools/software, participants will explore manual and semi-automated workflows for data extraction, annotation, quality control, and validation. The programme also showcases CODATA India–led AI and NLP-based approaches to biodiversity knowledge extraction, highlighting how automation can complement expert curation for large-scale literature mining, corpus building, and semantic integration.

Objectives

Data & FAIR Foundations:
- Understand FAIR data principles; relevance to biodiversity science and policy.
- Role of CODATA and international data infrastructures in enabling open science.
Plazi & Literature-Based Data Liberation:
- Understand the Plazi workflow and associated repositories
- TreatmentBank, BLR, GBIF, BiodiversityPMC
- Learn how biodiversity data is extracted from publications and converted into machine-readable formats (e.g. JATS XML).
- Use GoldenGate and related Plazi tools for manual and semi-automated data extraction.
- Understand manual vs automated workflows for conversion, annotation, and retrieval.
- Learn about materials citation, annotation quality control, and data validation.
- Use the GGI program, Plazi’s main instrument for data liberation.
- Work toward certification as new users of Plazi’s tools
CODATA India-Led AI & Knowledge Extraction:
- Learn about India-developed AI/NLP-based biodiversity knowledge extraction toolkits.
- Understand how AI can complement manual curation for: Large-scale literature mining, Building domain-specific corpora (regional, taxon-specific, journal-specific)
- Semantic enrichment and cross-repository integration
- Discuss ethical, technical, and sustainability challenges of AI-driven extraction.
Data Reuse & Impact:
- Identify major digital biodiversity data repositories, their specificities, and query methods.
- Explore reuse pathways for extracted data in: Research & synthesis, Conservation planning, Environmental assessments, Education and policy
- Design small group projects demonstrating end-to-end data liberation and reuse.
- Strengthen India–Plazi and India–global partnerships for long-term collaboration.

Who can register?

Undergraduate and graduate students in biological and environmental sciences
Early-career researchers and faculty
Museum professionals and collection curators
Biodiversity informatics practitioners & enthusiasts
Data scientists and AI researchers interested in life sciences
Professionals from government agencies and NGOs working on biodiversity data

Date

MARCH 24 - 27, 2026

Venue

BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research (BRIC-NIPGR)

Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi, India

Registration

Click Here to Register

Course Coordinators

Dr. Gitanjali Yadav: NIPGR, CODATA India
Dr. Julia Giora : Plazi, Brazil
Dr. Narendra Kumar, BRIC-NII
Dr. Felipe Simões: Plazi, Brazil

Speakers

Dr. Gitanjali Yadav, BRIC-NIPGR | CODATA India
Dr. D. Chattopadhyay, Director NIPGR
Dr. D. Mohanty, Director NII, CODATA India National Committee Chairperson
Dr. Shruti Rai Bhardwaj, Director, Ministry of Environment Forest & Climate Change, GoI
Prof. Manzoor Shah, University of Kashmir, Srinagar
Dr. Gautam Talukdar, Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun
Prof. Suresh Babu, Director CUES, AUD
Dr. Donat Agosti, Founder, PLAZI, Switzerland
Dr. Julia Giora, PLAZI
Dr. Felipe Simoes, PLAZI
Dr. Renu Kumari, semanticClimate
Mr. Karthikeyan, BRIC-NII, New Delhi
Ms. Priti, BRIC-NIPGR