Two customized queries to search for Puerto Rican plants by common name, using the Google Programable Search Engine and the Wikidata Query Service

Abstract

My project was to create a custom search engine for Puerto Rican plants that would be part of a subject guide for botany at a Puerto Rican university. There were two things that I wanted it to do: provide access to information for a general audience, and be an entry point to a rich variety of information, relevant to botany proper as well as to conservation and cultural (ethnobotanical) knowledge. Because of this desire to serve a general audience, my first objective for the search engine was that it would work by entering only the common name of a plant. I was interested in learning how to make use of two resources towards this end: the Google customizable search engine, and Wikidata.