Frontiers of biodiversity informatics and modelling species distributions #GBIFfrontiers @AMNH videos

For those of you who, like me, weren't at the "Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions" held at the AMNH in New York, here are the videos of the talks and panel discussion, which the organisers have kindly put up on Vimeo with the following description:

The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) partnered with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to host a special "Symposium and Panel Discussion: Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions" at the American Museum of Natural History on November 4, 2015.

The event kicked off a working meeting of the GBIF Task Group on Data Fitness for Use in Distribution Modelling at the City College of New York on November 5-6. GBIF convened the Task Group to assess the state of the art in the field, to connect with the worldwide scientific and modelling communities, and to share a vision of how GBIF support them in the coming decade.

The event successfully convened a broad, global audience of students and scientists to exchange ideas and visions on emerging frontiers of biodiversity informatics. Using inputs from the symposium and from a web survey of experts, the Data Fitness task group will prepare a report, which will be open for consultation and feedback at GBIF.org and on the GBIF Community Site in December 2015.

Web Hooks and OpenURL: the screencast

Yesterday I posted notes on Web Hooks and OpenURL. That post was written when I was already late (you know, when you say to yourself "yeah, I've got time, it'll just take 5 minutes to finish this..."). The Web Hooks + OpenURL project is still very much a work in progress, but I thought a screen cast would help explain why I think this is going to make my life a lot easier. It shows an example where I look at a bibliographic record in one database (AFD, the Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB), click on a link that takes me to BioStor — where I can find the reference in BHL — then simply click on a button on the BioStor page to "automagically" update the AFD database. The "magic" is the Web Hook. The link I click on in the AFD database contains the identifier for that entry in the AFD, as well a a URL BioStor can call when it's found the reference (that URL is the "web hook").

Using Web Hooks and OpenURL from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

London Calling Video

Here's the video of my talk at the NHM (courtesy of Vince Smith).


Going Digital - by Rod Page from Vince Smith on Vimeo.

Elsevier Grand Challenge Video

Elsevier have released this video about the challenge, featuring a few of the contestants. I couldn't get my act together in time to send anything useful, and having seen the 16 gigabytes song (full version here), I'm glad I didn't -- there's just no way I could compete with Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie.

Encyclopedia of Life Launch

The Encyclopedia of Life web site is up, together with some rather breathless publicity and this cool movie. Of course, it's all vapourware just now. I'm involved in some of the informatics in an advisory role. It will be interesting to see what happens. Let's hope that the fate of EoL will be different to that of the similarly ambitious All Species. Oh, and then there's SpeciesBase...

For some reaction see Slashdot.