Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Collaborative data matrices using EditGrid



EditGrid is an online collaborative spreadsheet tool that I stumbled across via Ogle Earth. It strikes me thjat this could be a way to create phylogenetic data sets collaboratively.



As a quick test I grabbed the Vertebrates example file that comes with MacClade, exported the NEXUS file as a table, opened it in Excel, then uploaded the Excel file to EditGrid. You can see the results here.


The spreadsheet is a natural metaphor for phylogenetic data, although in this application is is likely to be better suited to morphological data where a team of people are assembling a matrix from various sources.

The developers of EditGrid have a blog whioch converys their own sense of excitement about this project.

2 comments:

Pierre Lindenbaum said...

Hi,
about spreadsheets, see also:

http://www.irows.com/
http://numsum.com/
http://spreadsheet.google.com
http://www.zohosheet.com/home.do

A+
Pierre

Anonymous said...

Hi Roderic,

Greetings from EditGrid! Just come across your blog and see you mentioned EditGrid, thanks a lot!

It's quite exciting for me to learn about EditGrid is somehow useful on genetic researches. And I'm very interested to know how we could make EditGrid even better for the purpose.

If you dun mind, do drop me an email at tony(_AT_)tnc(_DOT_)hk about your ideas! We really wish to hear more from users like you!