Friday, July 30, 2010

Flipboard and BHL

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Flipboard is a new application for the iPad that is pitching itself as a personalised social magazine. It's launch created a lot of buz...
Friday, July 09, 2010

Wikipedia paper out

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My short note on "Wikipedia as an Encyclopaedia of Life" has appeared in Organisms Diversity & Evolution ( doi:10.1007/s13127...
Thursday, July 08, 2010

Show me the trees! Playing with the TreeBASE API

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Being in an unusually constructive mood, I've spent the last couple of days playing with the TreeBASE II API , in an effort to find out ...
Tuesday, July 06, 2010

ZooKeys publishes articles of the future

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The open access taxonomic journal ZooKeys has published a special issue with four papers, each available in HTML, PDF, and XML, the later b...
Monday, July 05, 2010

iEvoBio: where to find out what went on

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Now that I'm back in Glasgow, albeit rather jet-lagged, time for a quick summary of the first iEvoBio meeting, held at the Evolution m...
Friday, June 25, 2010

Evolution 2010 talk schedule for iCal

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In a moment of madness brought on by trying to make sense of 10 Mb of conference schedule for Evolution 2010 , I extracted the text from the...
Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Mashing up NCBI and Wikipedia using treemaps

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Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wan...
Thursday, June 17, 2010

NCBI to Wikipedia links are now live...

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The 52,956 links from NCBI to Wikipedia that I've been busy creating are now "live." If you go to a NCBI taxon such as Sphaer...

PLoS doesn't "get" the iPad (or the web)

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PLoS recently announced a dedicated iPad app, that covers all the PLoS Journals , and which is available from the App Store . Given the stat...
Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Linking NCBI to Wikipedia

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In an earlier post I discussed linking NCBI taxonomy to Wikipedia. One way to tackle this is to add NCBI Taxonomy ID to Wikipedia pages. I ...
Sunday, June 06, 2010

Nexus Data Editor running on Mac OS X

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In an earlier post I expressed my amazement that my venerable Nexus Data Editor (NDE) still had users, meaning I had to rebuild the instal...
Wednesday, June 02, 2010

TreeBASE II RDF

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One of the potentially powerful features of TreeBASE II is availability of a RDF version of a study. This means that, in principle, one coul...
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

TreeBASE II makes me pull my hair out

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I've been playing a little with TreeBASE II , and the more I do the more I want to pull my hair out. Broken URLs The old TreeBASE had a ...
Friday, May 21, 2010

Linked data part 2

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Continuing the Friday folly theme, below is a screencast of a linked data browser that uses the same ideas as last week's screencast , b...
Thursday, May 20, 2010

NCBI Taxonomy IDs and Wikipedia

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I've written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page making the case for adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard Taxobox used to summaris...
Friday, May 14, 2010

Viewing a BioStor reference in Cooliris

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Cooliris is a web browser plugin that can display a large number of images as a moving "infinite" wall. It's Friday, so for f...

Linking biodiversity data

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Time for a Friday folly. I've made a clunky screencast showing an example of linking biodiversity data together, using bioGUID as the u...
Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Drawing a phylogeny in a web browser using the canvas element

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Some serious displacement activity. I'm toying with adding phylogenies to iSpecies , probably sourced from the PhyLoTA browser . This ra...
Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Why we need wikis

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I've just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to find a reference in BioStor. The reference in question is Heller, Edmund 1901. Paper...
Monday, May 10, 2010

Referring to a one-degree square in RDF using c-squares

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I'm in the midst of rebuilding iSpecies (my mash-up of Wikipedia, NCBI, GBIF, Yahoo, and Google search results) with the aim of outputt...