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iPhylo

Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188. Written content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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If we view biodiversity data as part of the "biodiversity knowledge graph" then specimens are a fairly central feature of that graph. I'm looking at ways to link specimens to sequences, taxa, publications, etc., and doing this across multiple data providers. Here are some rough notes on trying to model this in a simple way.

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Following on from the previous post on putting GBIF data onto Google Maps, I'm now going to put DNA barcodes onto Google Maps. You can see the result at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/bold-map/, which displays around 1.2 million barcodes obtained from the International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) releases.

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The following is a guest blog post by David Schindel and colleagues and is a response to the paper by Antonio Marques et al. in Science doi:10.1126/science.341.6152.1341-a. Marques, Maronna and Collins (1) rightly call on the biodiversity research community to include latitude/longitude data in database and published records of natural history specimens.

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Quick note to highlight the following publication: This paper outlines the methods used by the BOLD project to cluster sequences into "BINS", and touches on the issue of dark taxa (taxa that are in GenBank but which lack formal scientific names). Might be time to revisit the dark taxa idea, especially now that I've got a better handle on the taxonomic literature (see BioNames) where the names of at least some dark taxa may lurk.

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Dark taxa have become even darker. NCBI has pulled the plug on large numbers of DNA barcode sequences that lack scientific names. For example, taxon Cyclopoida sp. BOLD:AAG9771 (tax_id 818059) now has a sparse page that has no associated sequences. From an earlier download of EMBL I know that this taxon is associated with at least 5 sequences, such as GU679674. But if you go to that sequence you get this: So the the sequence is hidden.

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In an earlier post (Are names really the key to the big new biology?, I questioned Patterson et al.'s assertion in a recent TREE article (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004) that names are key to the new biology. In this post I'm going to revisit this idea by doing a quick analysis of how many species in GenBank have "proper" scientific names, and whether the number of named species has changed over time.

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Mauro Cavalcanti brought Chris Anderson's The End of Theory article in Wired to my attention, part of the July issue on "The End of Science". Of course, the end of science is hyperbole of the highest order (as, indeed, is the "end of theory"). It is also ironic that in the same issue Wired confess to having gotten 5 predictions of the death of something hopelessly wrong (including web browsers and online music swapping, no less). However, I