I've tweaked Ozymandias to now include short natural language summaries (snippets) for various taxa. This makes the output a little more friendly and informative. For example, here's a snippet from the page on Cephalodesmius , a dung beetle that makes its own dung. These snippets come from Wikipedia, well actually, from the DBpedia project.

Given that Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) all share the goal of making information free, open, and accessible, there seems to be a lot of potential for useful collaboration. Below I sketch out some ideas. BHL as a source of references for Wikipedia Wikipedia likes to have sources cited to support claims in its articles. BHL has a lot of articles that could be cited by Wikipedia articles.

For anyone doing research or involved in scientific infrastructure, demonstrating the "impact" of those activities is becoming increasingly important.

My paper "Surfacing the deep data of taxonomy" (based on a presentation I gave in 2011) has appeared in print as part to a special issue of Zookeys : The manuscript was written shortly after the talk, but as is the nature of edited volumes it's taken a while to appear. My tweet about the paper sparked some interesting comments from David Shorthouse.

Last week I attended the Wikipedia Science Conference (hashtag: #wikisci) at the Wellcome Trust in London. it was an interesting two days of talks and discussion. Below are a few random notes on topics that caught my eye. What is Wikidata? A recurring theme was the emergence of Wikidata, although it never really seemed clear what role Wikidata saw for itself.

One of the less glamorous but necessary tasks of data cleaning is mapping "strings to things", that is, taking strings such as "George A. Boulenger" and mapping them to identifiers, such as ISNI: 0000 0001 0888 841X. In case of authors such as George Boulenger, one way to do this would be through Wikipedia, which has entries for many scientists, often linked to identifiers for those people (see the bottom of the Wikipedia page for George A.

My paper describing the mapping between NCBI and Wikipedia has been published in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life. You can see the paper here. It's only just gone live, so it's yet to get a PubMed Central number (one of the nice features of PLoS Currents is that the articles get archived in PMC). Publishing in PLoS Currents: Tree of Life was a pleasant experience. The Google Knol editing environment was easy to use, and the reviewing process quick.

Continuing experiments with a zoom viewer for large trees (see previous post), I've now made a demo where the labels are clickable. If the NCBI taxon has an equivalent page in Wikipedia the demo displays and link to that page (and, if present, a thumbnail image). Give it a try at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/deeptree/3.html or watch the short video clip below: Zoomable viewer with Wikipedia thumbnails from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

My views on TreeBASE are pretty well known. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how to "fix" TreeBASE, or indeed, move beyond it. I've made a couple of baby steps in this direction. The first step is that I've created a group for TreeBASE papers on Mendeley.

My short note on "Wikipedia as an Encyclopaedia of Life" has appeared in Organisms Diversity &