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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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As part of a project to build a tool to navigate through taxonomic names and classifications I've become interested in quick ways to compare classifications. For example, EOL has multiple classifications for the same taxon, and I'd like to quickly discover what the similarities and differences are.

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One visualisation method I keep coming back too is the treemap. Each time I experiment with them I learn a little bit more, but I usually end up abandoning them (with the exception of using quantum treemaps to display bibliographic data). But they keep calling me back.

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There's a recent thread on the Encyclopedia of Life concerning erroneous images for the crab Leptograpsus . This is a crab I used to chase around rooks on stormy west-coast beaches near Auckland, so I was a little surprised to see the EOL page for Leptograpsus looks like this: The name and classification is the crab, but the image is of a fish ( Lethrinus variegatus ). Perhaps at some point in aggregating the images

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In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

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The Encyclopedia of Life have announced the EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. The contest has two purposes: First prize is a trip to iEvoBio 2012, this year in Ottawa, Canada. For more details visit the challenge website. There is also an EOL community devoted to this challenge. Challenges are great things, especially ones with worthwhile tasks and decent prizes. EOL badly needs a phylogenetic perspective, so this is a welcome development.

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Browsing EOL I stumbled upon the recently described fish Protoanguilla palau , shown below in an image by rairaiken2011: Two things struck me, the first is that the EOL page for this fish gives absolutely no clue as to where you would to find out more about this fish (apart from an unclickable link to the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoanguilla - seriously, a link that isn't clickable?), despite the fact this fish

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The Encylopedia of Life (EOL) has been relaunched, with a new look and much social media funkiness. I've been something of an EOL sceptic, but looking at the new site I think I can see what EOL is for. Ironically, it's not really about E. O. Wilson's original vision (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)00040-X: We still lack a decent database that does this.