Episode 010 - Steve Baskauf

In this episode we feature an interview with Steve Baskauf, senior lecturer in biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. Steve coordinates the introductory biological sciences labs, trains and mentors the undergraduate and graduate student teaching assistants for those labs, and designing and assesses inquiry-based lab curricula. However, this interview focuses on another aspect of his work at Vanderbilt: biodiversity informatics. Steve has developed Bioimages, an online image database with over 10,000 annotated plant and ecosystem images, and he has created mobile-friendly tree tours of the Vanderbilt campus. We talked with Steve about the semantic web, linked data, and the challenges and opportunities of creating and using machine-readable datasets. Links: • Steve Baskauf’s website, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/baskauf/ • @baskaufs on Twitter, https://twitter.com/baskaufs • @vutrees on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/vutrees/ • Vanderbilt Arboretum tree tours, http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/tours/ • Bioimages website, http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/ • Linked Data and Semantic Web working group at the Vanderbilt Library, https://heardlibrary.github.io/semantic-web/