Wednesday, May 09, 2018

World Taxonomists and Systematists via ORCID

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David Shorthouse ( @dpsspiders ) makes some very cool things, and his latest project World Taxonomists & Systematists is a great exampl...

2018 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge now open

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Last year I finished my four-year stint as Chair of the GBIF Science Committee. During that time, partly as a result of my urging, GBIF laun...

iSpecies meets Lifemap

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It's been a little quiet on this blog as I've been teaching, and spending a lot of time data wrangling and trying to get my head aro...
Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Guest post: The Not problem

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The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov . Nico Franz and Beckett Sterner created a stir last year with a preprint in bioRxiv about ...
Monday, December 11, 2017

Towards a digital natural history museum

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These notes are the result of a few events I've been involved in the last couple of months, including TDWG 2017 in Ottawa, a thesis def...
Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Blue Planet II, the BBC, and the Semantic Web: a tale of lessons forgotten and opportunities lost

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David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the...
Friday, November 10, 2017

Exploring images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository

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A post by on the Plaza blog Expanded access to images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository has prompted me to write up a little toy I ...
Friday, October 06, 2017

Notes on finding georeferenced sequences in GenBank

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Notes on how many georeferenced DNA sequences there are in GenBank, and how many could potentially be georeferenced. BCT Bacterial sequen...
Wednesday, October 04, 2017

TDWG 2017: thoughts on day 3

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Day three of TDWG 2017 highlighted some of the key obstacles facing biodiversity informatics. After a fun series of "wild ideas"...

Bitcoin, biodiversity, and micropayments for open data

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I gave a "wild ideas" talk at TDWG17 suggesting that the biodiversity community use Bitcoin to make micropayments to use data. ...
Tuesday, October 03, 2017

TDWG 2017: thoughts on day 1

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Some random notes on the first day of TDWG 2017. First off, great organisation with the first usable conference calendar app that I've s...
Monday, September 18, 2017

Guest post: Our taxonomy is not your taxonomy

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The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov . Do you know the party game "Telephone", also known as "Chinese Whispers...
Monday, August 28, 2017

Let’s rise up to unite taxonomy and technology

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Let’s rise up to unite taxonomy and technology - I thought it already was? @rdmpage https://t.co/AkNz1GYGbw — Sjúrður Hammer 🐣 (@sjurdur) ...
Sunday, August 20, 2017

Notes on displaying big trees using Google Maps/Leaflet

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Notes to self on web map-style tree viewers. The basic idea is to use Google Maps or Leaflet to display a tree. Hence we need to compute til...
Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video (1987): we are still a long way from this vision

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I've been viewing Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video from 1987 and it's striking how much of this we have today, and yet ...
Friday, June 30, 2017

Response to To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design Behind Aggregated Biodiversity Data

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Nico Franz and Beckett W. Sterner recently published a preprint entitled "To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design Behind Aggregated...