Here I summarise a few posts on Bluesky where I raised concerns about some metadabarcoding datasets that were highlighted by GBIF: Looking at these datasets it’s clear that something is wrong. Data The datasets discussed are for CO1 Amplicon Sequence Variants from Madagascar, which are part of the Insect Biome Atlas project.
Following on from releasing BOLD View I’ve started to explore how the classifcation of DNA barcodes changes over time. BOLD uses the RESL algorithm described in Ratnasingham & Hebert (2013, 2016) to cluster barcodes into “BINs”. As the number of DNA barcodes grows over time these clusters may change.
On Wednesday this week (April 9th, 2025) I gave a talk entitled “Future interface(s) for BHL” (the slides are on FigShare) at BHL Day 2025.
For a while now I’ve been exploring ways to navigate through DNA barcodes. Over the years I’ve built various “toys” to explore barcodes, such as Displaying a million DNA barcodes on Google Maps using CouchDB, built a small scale browser using Elastic search that had some succes, and discovered that Postgres can search for DNA sequences and it’s really fast.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Internet Archive as a single point of failure https://doi.org/10.59350/1r3m1-c5e22 Just a placeholder to mark the ongoing impact of the Internet Archive being attacked (see here, here and here for details). The impact of this on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has been huge, and reveals the extent to which BHL depends on the Archive.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Exploring BOLD's DNA barcode data releases: there's a fraction too much friction https://doi.org/10.59350/6qepn-ge510 Recently I’ve been exploring data downloaded from BOLD. Part of this was motivated by work done with David Schindel for a recent book: In this blog post I record some struggles I’ve had with the supposedly “Frictionless” data provided by BOLD.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). The Data Citation Corpus revisited https://doi.org/10.59350/wvwva-v7125 TL;DR These are some brief notes on the latest version (v. 2) of the Data Citation Corpus, relased shortly before the Make Data Count Summit 2024, which also included a discussion on the practical uses of the corpus. I downloaded version 2 from Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.13376773.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Why do museum and gallery displays ignore the web? https://doi.org/10.59350/a83tn-c6t14 This post is inspired by the Pharaoh exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne, Australia. This is a beautifully displayed exhibition of objects from the British Museum, London. It has all the trappings of a modern exhibition, beautiful lighting, a custom sound track, and lots of social media coverage.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). A future for the Biodiversity Heritage Library https://doi.org/10.59350/n3dkt-6xd05 Following the 2024 BHL meeting, and the departure of Martin Kalfatovic and the uncertainty the departure of such a pivitol person brings, perhaps it’s time to think about the future of BHL. Below I sketch some thoughts, which are hazy at best. I should say at the outset that I think BHL is an extraordinary project.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Visualising big trees: a talk at the Systematics Association 2024 https://doi.org/10.59350/cf6n4-ch767 This blog post has some notes in support of a talk given to the Systematics Association meeting in Reading June 20th, 2024. Slides I will post a link to the slides here once I have given the talk. Page, Roderic (2024). Visualising big trees. figshare. Presentation.
How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Nanopubs, a way to create even more silos https://doi.org/10.59350/6nj85-7te92 Pensoft have recently introduced “nanopubs”, small structured publications that can be thought of as containing the minimum possible statement that could be published. Nanopubs are promoted as FAIR, that is findable, accessible, interoperabile, and reusable.