Computer and Information SciencesBlogger

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.
Home PageAtom FeedMastodonISSN 2051-8188
language
Published

David ("Paddy") Patterson, Jerry Cooper, Paul Kirk, Rich Pyle, and David Remsen have published an article in TREE entitled "Names are key to the big new biology" (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004). The abstract states: Do we need names? Reading this (full disclosure, I was a reviewer) I can't wondering whether the assumption that names are key really needs to be challenged.

Published

When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the (Biodiversity heritage Library) I wanted people to be able to edit metadata and add references, but also minimise the chances that junk would get added. As a quick and dirty deterrent I used reCAPTCHA, so anybody adding a reference or editing the metadata had to pass a CAPTHCA before their edits were accepted.

Published

Playing with @couchdb, starting to think of the Mendeley API as a read/write JSON store, and having a reader app built on that...less than a minute ago via Tweetie for Mac Roderic Page rdmpage It's slowly dawning on me that many of the ingredients for an alternative different way to browse scientific articles may already be in place.

Published

In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were: PLoS Reader Nature Papers Mendeley So, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.

Published

Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley. The app provides some summary statistics (mine are shown below), and if you click on the horizontal bar corresponding to a paper, you can see a visualisation of who is reading your paper, including a nice map.

Published

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app. As before, this isn't a review of the app as such, I'm more interested in documenting how the app interface works, with a view to discovering if there are consistent metaphors we can use for navigating bibliographic databases.

Published

Paulo Nuin, not the biggest fan of Mendeley wrote a blog post entitled Mendeley is going to be open source, in which he wrote: Among the essays Paulo read is Jason Hoyt's post on the Mendeley blog: Dear researcher, which side of history will you be on?. In response to a question about open sourcing the Mendeley client, Jason replied: Despite the fact that open sourcing the desktop client is the second most requested feature for Mendeley, I