Friday, October 04, 2013

Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) launched

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Wednesday saw the launch of the Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO), based in large part on the Global Biodiversity Informatics C...
Thursday, October 03, 2013

Thoughts on the NESCent-EOL-BHL Research Sprint

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NESCent, EOL, and BHL have put together a research sprint : We invite participants for an event that will pioneer the mining of the Encyclop...
Friday, September 27, 2013

Biodiversity informatics in charts

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I've just come back from II Iberian Congress of Biological Systematics (CISA2013) in Barcelona, where I had a great time. I gave a pre...
Friday, September 20, 2013

The quality of GBIF's taxonomic classification

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In some recent posts I've been exploring the quality of GBIF's taxonomic data. I've done some further analyses and decided to wr...
Thursday, September 12, 2013

The spy who loved frogs and taxonomy as a digital backwater

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A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor , and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxono...
Thursday, September 05, 2013

"Lost Branches on the Tree of Life" - why must the answer be enforcing behaviour?

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Bryan Drew and colleagues have published a piece in PLoS Biology bemoaning the lack of databased phylogenies: Drew, B. T., Gazis, R., Cabeza...
Monday, August 26, 2013

Bat names, ligatures, and fonts

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Notes on fonts in trying decipher some bat names (and sort out some synonyms). It can be difficult to tell "œ" (o + e) from "...
Thursday, August 15, 2013

BioNames update - taxonomic name timelines

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One feature I've always wanted to have in BioNames is a timeline of taxonomic names. ION has one (see here ), but I wanted a way to go ...
Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Cluster maps, papaya plots, and the trouble with GBIF taxonomy

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Continuing the theme of the failings of the GBIF classification I've been playing further with cluster maps to visualise the problem (s...
Monday, August 05, 2013

GBIF and open biodiversity data: what license should GBIF use?

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GBIF is asking for views on how it should license of data in the GBIF network. The full consultation document is available from Google Drive...
Thursday, August 01, 2013

A use case for RDF in taxonomy

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Readers of this blog will know that I'm sceptical about the current value of linked data and RDF in biodiversity informatics . But I cam...
Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Augmenting ZooKeys bibliographic data to flesh out the citation graph

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In a previous post ( Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository ) I discussed the advantages of an Open Access journal putting its...
Monday, July 15, 2013

Using @IFTTT to create a Twitter stream for @EvolDir

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Since 2009 I've been running a service that takes posts to the EvolDir mailing list and sends them to a Twitter stream at @EvolDir . Thi...
Friday, July 12, 2013

Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository

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Playing with my eLife Lens-inspired article viewer and some recent articles from ZooKeys I regularly come across articles that are incorre...
Thursday, July 11, 2013

Barcode Index Number (BIN) System in DNA barcoding explained

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Quick note to highlight the following publication: Ratnasingham, S., & Hebert, P. D. N. (2013). A DNA-Based Registry for All Animal Sp...
Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The challenge of semantically marking up articles (more thoughts on PLoS Hubs)

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Here's a sketch of my vision of how to make something like the original PLoS Hubs vision (see The demise of the @PLoS Biodiversity Hub: ...
Tuesday, July 09, 2013

The problem with apps for journals

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I'm a big fan of the work Nature publishing group is doing in experimenting with new methods of publishing, such as their iOS apps ( whi...

The demise of the @PLoS Biodiversity Hub: what lessons can we learn?

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Jonathan Eisen recently wrote that the PLOS Hub for Biodiversity is soon to be retired , and sure enough it's vanished from the web (the...
Wednesday, June 19, 2013

A new way to view taxonomic publications

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One of goals of BioNames is to be more than simply another taxonomic database. In particular, I'm interested in the idea of having a pl...

More GBIF taxonomy fail

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In browsing the GBIF classification in BioNames I keep coming across cases of wholesale duplication of taxa. I recently blogged about a sin...