Friday, October 23, 2009

n-gram fulltext indexing in MySQL

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Continuing with my exploration of the Biodiversity Heritage Library one obstacle to linking BHL content with nomenclature databases is the ...
Saturday, October 17, 2009

Memcached, Mac OS X, and PHP

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Thinking about ways to improve the performance of some of my web servers I've begun to toy with Memcached. These notes are to remind me ...
Thursday, October 08, 2009

Linking Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature to BHL

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After some fussing and hair pulling I've constructed a demo of linking a journal to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and displaying the...
Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Zotero group for Biodiversity Heritage Library content

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One thing I find myself doing (probably more often than I should) is adding a reference to my Zotero library for an item in the Biodiversit...
Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Wikipedia and Gregg's paradox

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Continuing the theme of taxonomic classification in Wikipedia , I'm perversely delighted that Wikipedia demonstrates Gregg's paradox...
Monday, October 05, 2009

Wikipedia's taxonomic classification is badly broken

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Wikipedia is wonderful, but parts of it are horribly broken. Take, for example, taxonomic classifications. A classification is a rooted tree...
Friday, October 02, 2009

Biodiversity Heritage Library sparklines

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Time for a quick and dirty Friday afternoon hack. Based on responses to the BHL timeline I released two days ago, I've created a versio...
Thursday, October 01, 2009

Co-located Collaborative Tree Comparison

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Stumbled across this cool visualisation project by Petra Isenberg at Calgary University. Collaborative tree comparison uses a tabletop sys...
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Visualising the Biodiversity Heritage Library as a Timeline

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One thing about the Encyclopedia of Life which bugs me no end is the awful way it displays the bibliography generated from the Biodiversity...
Monday, September 28, 2009

Google Scholar metadata quality and Mendeley hype

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Hot on the heels of Geoffrey Nunberg's essay about the train wreck that is Google books metadata (see my earlier post ) comes Google Sc...
Saturday, September 19, 2009

Biodiversity Heritage Library, Google books, and metadata quality

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I've been playing recently with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), and am starting to get a sense for the complexities (and limit...
Thursday, September 17, 2009

Towards a wiki of phylogenies

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At the start of this week I took part in a biodiversity informatics workshop at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseets , organised by Kevin Holston...

When taxonomists wage war in Wikipedia

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Stumbled across Alex Wild's post Pyramica vs Strumigenys : why does it matter? , which takes as it's starting point a minor edit wa...
Friday, September 11, 2009

Gene Wiki and Google

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Andrew Su has posted an analysis of Gene Wiki , a project to provide Wikipedia pages on every human gene: Here's the take home message:...
Friday, September 04, 2009

Visualising edit history of a Wikipedia page

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Quick post (really should be doing something else). Reading Jeff Atwood's post Mixing Oil and Water: Authorship in a Wiki World lead me...
Thursday, September 03, 2009

Google and Wikipedia revisited

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Given that one response to my post on Fungi in Wikipedia was to say that fungi are also charismatic, so maybe I should try [insert unsexy t...
Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Fungi in Wikipedia

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One response to the analysis I did of the Google rank of mammal pages in Wikipedia is to suggest that Wikipedia does well for mammals becau...
Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Wikipedia mammals and the power law

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Playing a bit more with the Wikipedia mammal data, there are some interesting patterns to note. The first is that rank the mammal pages by s...

Google, Wikipedia, and EOL

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One assumption I've been making so far is that when people search for information on an organism using its scientific name, Wikipedia wi...
Monday, August 31, 2009

Comparing Wikipedia and Mammal Species of the World classifications

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Continuing the saga of making sense of the mammal classification in Wikipedia, I've done a quick comparison with the Mammal Species of t...