Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Quantum treemaps meet BHL and the Australian Faunal Directory

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One of the things I'm enjoying about the Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB is the chance to play with some ideas without worrying ...
Friday, January 14, 2011

The demise of phthiraptera.org and the perils of using Internet domain names as identifiers

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When otherwise sensible technorati refer to "owning" a domain name, it makes me want to stick forks in my eyeballs. We do not ...
Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Why won't The Plant List won't let me do this?

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In my last post I discussed why I thought the decision of The Plant List to use a restrictive license (CC-BY-NC-ND) was such a poor choice...
Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Plant List: nice data, shame it's not open

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The Plant List ( http://www.theplantlist.org/ ) has been released today, complete with glowing press releases . The list includes some 1,040...
Thursday, December 23, 2010

BHL and OCR

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Some quick notes on OCR. Revisiting my DjVu viewer experiments it really struck me how "dirty" the OCR text is. It's readable...
Monday, December 20, 2010

BioStor one year on: has it been a success?

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One year ago I released BioStor , which scratched my itch regarding finding articles in the Biodiversity Heritage Library . This anniversary...
Wednesday, December 15, 2010

TreeBASE, again

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My views on TreeBASE are pretty well known . Lately I've been thinking a lot about how to "fix" TreeBASE, or indeed, move be...
Monday, December 13, 2010

How do I know if an article is Open Access?

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One of my pet projects is to build a "Universal Article Reader" for the iPad (or similar mobile device), so that a reader can see...
Thursday, December 09, 2010

Viewing scientific articles on the iPad: cloning the Nature.com iPhone app using jQuery Mobile

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Over the last few months I've been exploring different ways to view scientific articles on the iPad, summarised here . I've also mad...
Wednesday, December 08, 2010

First thoughts on CiteBank and BHL-Europe

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This week saw the release of two tools from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, CiteBank and the BHL-Europe portal . Both have actually been...
Thursday, December 02, 2010

Linking taxonomic databases to the primary literature: BHL and the Australian Faunal Directory

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Continuing my hobby horse of linking taxonomic databases to digitised literature, I've been working for the last couple of weeks on link...
Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Mendeley mangles my references: phantom documents and the problem of duplicate references

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One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears t...
Monday, November 01, 2010

CouchDB and Lucene

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Quick notes to self on fulltext search and CouchDB. Note that links to CouchDB are local to my machine(s),and won't work unless you are ...
Monday, October 25, 2010

Are names really the key to the big new biology?

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David ("Paddy") Patterson, Jerry Cooper, Paul Kirk, Rich Pyle, and David Remsen have published an article in TREE entitled "N...
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Mendeley, BHL, and the "Bibliography of Life"

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One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature. Typically, tax...
Friday, October 08, 2010

Towards an interactive DjVu file viewer for the BHL

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The bulk of the Biodiversity Heritage Library's content is available as DjVu files, which package together scanned page images and OCR t...
Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Scripting Life

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Not really a blog post, more a note to self. If I ever did get around to writing a book again, I think Scripting Life would be a great titl...

PLoS Biodiversity Hub launches

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The PLoS Biodiversity Hub has launched today. There's a PLoS blog post explaining the background to the project, as well as a summary ...
Friday, October 01, 2010

Replicating and forking data in 2010: Catalogue of Life and CouchDB

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Time (just) for a Friday folly. A couple of days ago the latest edition of the Catalogue of Life (CoL) arrived in my mailbox in the form of...
Friday, September 24, 2010

Mendeley Connect

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When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the ( Biodiversity heritage Library ) I wanted people to be able...