IT Staff

William Ulate Rodríguez
Senior Project Manager
Center for Biodiversity Informatics

office phone: + 1 (314) 577-9473 x76398
email: william.ulate@mobot.org

Missouri Botanical Garden
4344 Shaw Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63110
USA

Education
B.Sc. Computer Sciences and Informatics 1990. University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica

From a strong bias towards science and a formal background in technology, the range of interests spans: Biodiversity Informatics and Bioinformatics Taxonomy, Biology, Ecology and Conservation Information Sciences, Citizen Science, Annotations and Crowdsourcing Information Retrieval, Linked Open Data, XML, RDF, OWL, and Biological Ontologies Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence Mobile applications, scientific and educational software
Personal and Professional Memberships Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG.org), member and current treasurer Biodiversity Informatics Research Center (CRBio), partner Earth Equilibrium (earthequilibrium.org), board member

Available upon request

Selected Publications and Presentations Borsch, T., Berendsohn, W., Dalcin, E., Delmas, M., Demissew, S., Elliott, A., Fritsch, P., Fuchs, A., Geltman, D., Güner, A., Haevermans, T., Knapp, S., le Roux, M.M., Loizeau, P.-A., Miller, C., Miller, J., Miller, J.T., Palese, R., Paton, A., Parnell, J., Pendry, C., Qin, H.-N., Sosa, V., Sosef, M., von Raab-Straube, E., Ranwashe, F., Raz, L., Salimov, R., Smets, E., Thiers, B., Thomas, W., Tulig, M., Ulate, W., Ung, V., Watson, M., Jackson, P.W. and Zamora, N. 2020. World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants. TAXON, 69: 1311-1341, Nov. 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12373. Ulate William, Mora M. Marcela. 2020. Assessment of Annotation Needs of Botanists. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59308, Oct. 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59308. Woodburn M., Paul D.L., Addink W., Baskauf S.J., Blum S., Chapman C., Grant S., Groom Q., Jones J., Petersen M., Raes N., Smith D., Tilley L., Trekels M., Trizna M., Ulate W., Vincent S., Walls R., Webbink K., Zermoglio P. 2020. Unity in Variety: Developing a collection description standard by consensus. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 4: e59233. Oct. 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59233. Ulate, William. 2019. Lessons Learned from Managing Millions of Records to Create the World Flora Online. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e35245, Jun. 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.35245. Walter Berendsohn , Chuck Miller, William Ulate, Mark Watson. 2019. Caught in the concept jungle: developing a format for data contributions to the World Flora Online. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e35232, Jun. 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.35232. Manuel Vargas, María Mora Cross, José Cuadra, William Ulate Rodríguez. 2019. Sharing Species Pages in the Atlas of Living Costa Rica using Plinian Core. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e35474, Jun. 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.35474. Woodburn M., Paul D., Ulate W., Raes N. 2019. Exposing the Dark Data of Undigitized Collections: A TDWG global standard for collection descriptions. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 3: e37201, Jun. 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.3.37201. Dagtekin, Onatkut, William Ulate, and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2018. “Towards the Automatic Extraction of Plant Traits from Textual Descriptions.” Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Sept. 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22032/DBT.37984. Batista-Navarro, Riza; Laporte, Marie-Angelique; Regan, Michael; Ulate, William and Weiland, Claus. 2018. Extending the Environment Ontology with Text-mined Habitat Mentions. In: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Sept. 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22032/dbt.37907. Manuel Vargas, María Mora, William Ulate, José Cuadra. 2018. “The Living Atlases Community in Action: Sharing Species Pages through the Atlas of Living Costa Rica” Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2: e25990, Aug. 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.2.25990. Chuck Miller and William Ulate. 2018. Descriptive Data Challenges for the World Flora Online, Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2: e26731, Aug. 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.2.26731. A.E. Thessen, C.J. Jenkins, R.L. Walls, S. Antony, R. Batista-Navarro, P.L. Buttigieg, J. Deck,R. Guralnick, M.A. Laporte, J. Nair, M. Regan, K. Schulz, B.J. Stucky, W. Ulate, J. Verdolin, C.Weiland, R. Bhat, R. Duerr, J. Martin, S. Myers, M. Palmer, J. Preciado. 2017. Extending the Ecological Ontologies Using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Conference: ClearEarth Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Earth Sciences project bioHackathon. Aug. 2017. Boulder, CO, USA. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329991157. Riza Batista-Navarro, Axel J. Soto, Nhung T.H. Nguyen, William Ulate, and Sophia Ananiadou. 2017. Tutorial: Enriching Digital Collections Using Tools for Text Mining, Indexing and Visualization, in J. Kamps et al. (Eds.): TPDL 2017, LNCS 10450, pp. 665–666, Sep. 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67008-9. Springer International Publishing AG 2017. Chuck Miller and William Ulate. 2017. World Flora Online Project: An online flora of all known plants, Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20529, Aug. 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/tdwgproceedings.1.20529. Riza Batista-Navarro, Nhung Nguyen, Axel Soto, William Ulate, Sophia Ananiadou. 2017. Argo as a Platform for Integrating Distinct Biodiversity Analytics Tools into Workflows for Building Graph Databases., Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20529, Aug. 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/tdwgproceedings.1.20067. Riza Theresa Batista-Navarro, Jennifer Hammock, William Ulate, Sophia Ananiadou. 2016. A Text Mining Framework for Accelerating the Semantic Curation of Literature. TPDL 2016: 459-462 Sept. 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43997-6_44. Ulate, W., Batista-Navarro, R. 2016. Real use cases for Semantic Information from the Mining Biodiversity project. Symposium 01A: Semantics for Biodiversity Science: Challenges & Solutions. TDWG 2016 Annual Conference, Dec. 2016. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/tdwg2016/paper/view/972. Batista-Navarro, R, Ulate, W., Hammock, J., Kontonatsios, G. Rose-Sandler, T., Ananiadou, S. 2015. Unlocking knowledge in biodiversity legacy literature through automatic semantic metadata extraction, TDWG 2015 Annual Conference, Set. 2015. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2015/paper/view/831. Kalfatovic,M., Sheffield, C., Ulate, W., Rinaldo, C., Costantino, G.. 2014. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Poster at TDWG 2014 Annual Conference, Oct. 2014. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2014/paper/view/565. Deborah Paul, Andrea Matsunaga, Miao Chen, Jason Best, Sylvia Orli, William Ulate, Reed Beaman. 2014. Data Discovery and Doer Happiness: Uses for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Output. Symposium S05. Access to digitisation tools and methods at TDWG 2014 Annual Conference, Oct. 2014. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2014/paper/view/597. Riza Batista-Navarro, Aminul Islam, William Ulate, Jennifer Hammock, Axel Soto, Sophia Ananiadou, Evangelos Milios. 2014. Enriching the legacy literature with OCR corrections and text-mined semantic metadata, Symposium S05. Access to digitisation tools and methods at TDWG 2014 Annual Conference, Oct. 2014. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2014/paper/view/588. William Ulate. 2014. Unlocking biodiversity knowledge through Text Mining and Crowdsourced Tagging of Legacy Literature. Symposium S08. Expanding the Usefulness of Literature in Sustaining Biodiversity at TDWG 2014 Annual Conference, Oct. 2014. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2014/paper/view/557. William Ulate. 2013. Expanding the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Symposium: Crafting the future of a Global Biodiversity Heritage Library for diverse community’s needs at TDWG 2013 Annual Conference, Oct. 2013. https://mbgocs.mobot.org/index.php/tdwg/2013/paper/view/455. Paul, Deborah L.; Heidorn, P. Bryan; Best, Jason; Gilbert, Edward; Neill, Amanda; Nelson, Gil; Ulate, William. 2013. Help iDigBio reveal hidden data: iDigBio Augmenting OCR working group needs you. iConference 2013 Workshop. iSchools, Feb. 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/42502. Anglin, Robert; Best, Jason; Figueiredo, Renato; Gilbert, Edward; Gnanasambandam, Nathan; Gottschalk, Stephen; Haston, Elspeth; Heidorn, P. Bryan; Lafferty, Daryl; Lang, Peter; Nelson, Gil; Paul, Deborah; Ulate, William; Watson, Kimberly; Zhang, Qianjin. 2013. Improving the character of optical character recognition (OCR): iDigBio augmenting OCR working group seeks collaborators and strategies to improve OCR parsing of OCR output for faster, more efficient, cheaper natural history collections specimen label digitization. iConference 2013 Workshop. iSchools Feb. 2013. pp. 957–964 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/42089. Trish-Rose Sandler, Constance A. Rinaldo, Keri Thompson, William Ulate, Martin Kalfatovic. 2012. Collaboration and communication tools used by the biodiversity heritage library. In Proceedings of the 12^th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. JCDL 2012: pp. 361-362 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2232817.2232891.