The Planetary Knowledge Base: an infinite solutions engine converting data into action for nature

What this was about

Vince Smith set out the Natural History Museum's vision of a Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB): infrastructure that combines knowledge graphs, foundation models and LLMs to connect fragmented biodiversity data at scale. He described phase-one projects: a new BHL discovery layer built on re-OCRed literature with Mistral, SCRIBE for label and card transcription, and an internal 'Museum Digital Backbone' built on Amazon Quick. He also described design principles that track provenance, attribution and benefit through the value chain, including remuneration models. Questions covered alignment with the CARE principles and dependence on AWS.

Why it matters. It is an ambitious attempt to build community-scale AI infrastructure for biodiversity. It says openly that big tech partners and commercial revenue will be needed, and that fair returns to data contributors are an open research problem.

In the room

• The big questions: moving data to evidence to action at scale, with continually growing data (10,000-20,000 records a day), unpredictable and urgent questions, provenance, and financial as well as ethical sustainability.
• The PKB aligns big data infrastructures (people, observations, collections, institutions, genetics, literature) using knowledge graphs plus foundation models and LLMs, and builds services on top.
• Because of the scale, the work is split into phased projects; the PKB is still in phase one.
• Literature layer: BHL has been almost entirely re-OCRed with Mistral, and institutions, taxa, specimens and articles are extracted into a new discovery layer.
• SCRIBE is the solution for transcribing card indexes, labels and herbarium sheets.
• Museum Digital Backbone: a miniature knowledge graph plus LLM over internal, non-shareable data (grant proposals, publications), built quickly with Amazon Quick.
• Design principles: preserve identifiers, provenance and licences at every step; make contributions visible through attribution; share benefits, possibly through remuneration models.

Notable moments