I've put off writing this post about the Bouchout Declaration for a number of reasons. I attended the meeting that launched the declaration last year, and from my perspective that was a frustrating meeting.

Playing with the my "material examined" tool I've been working on, I wondered whether I could make use of it in, say, a spreadsheet. Imagine that I have a spreadsheet of museum codes and want to look those up in GBIF. I could create a service for Open Refine but Open Refine is a bit big and clunky, you have to fire up a Java application and point your browser at it, and Open Refine isn't as intuitive or as flexible as a spreadsheet.

The six finalists for the GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge have been announced by GBIF: The finalists all receive a €1,000 prize, and now have the possibility to refine their work and compete for the grand prize of €20,000 (€5000 for second place). As the rather cheesy quote above suggests, I think the challenge has been a success in terms of the interest generated, and the quality of the entrants.

I've put together a working demo of some code I've been working on to discover GBIF records that correspond to museum specimen codes. The live demo is at http://bionames.org/~rpage/material-examined/ and code is on GitHub. To use the demo, simply paste in a specimen code (e.g., "MCZ 24351") and click Find and it will do it's best to parse the code, then go off to GBIF and see what it can find.

The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has closed and we have 23 submissions for the jury to evaluate. There's quite a range of project types (and media, including sound and physical objects), and it's going to be fascinating to evaluate all the entries (some of which are shown below). This is the first time GBIF has run this challenge, so it's gratifying to see so much creativity in response to the challenge.

Quick notes on another example of data duplication in GBIF. I'm in the process of building a tool to map specimen codes to GBIF records, and came across the following example.

PubPeer is a web site where people can discuss published articles, anonymously if they prefer. I finally got a chance to play with it a few days, it it was a fascinating experience. You simply type in the DOI or PMID for an article and see if anyone has said anything about that article.

Below I sketch what I believe is a straightforward way GBIF could tackle the issue of annotating and cleaning its data. It continues a series of posts Annotating GBIF: some thoughts, Rethinking annotating biodiversity data, and More on annotating biodiversity data: beyond sticky notes and wikis on this topic. Let's simplify things a little and state that GBIF at present is essentially an aggregation of Darwin Core Archive files.

For the last few weeks I've been working on a little project to display phylogenies on web-based maps such as OpenStreetMap and Google Maps. Below I'll sketch out the rationale, but if you're in a hurry you can see a live demo here: http://iphylo.org/~rpage/geojson-phylogeny-demo/, and some examples below.

A couple of articles in the tech press got me thinking this morning about Bitcoin, Ted Nelson, Xanadu, and the web that wasn't. The articles are After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web and Transforming the web into a HTTPA 'database'. There are some really interesting ideas being explored based on centralised tracking of resources (including money, think Bitcoin, and other assets, think content). I wonder whether these developments may

Each year about this time, as I ponder what to devote my time on in the coming year, I get exasperated and frustrated that each year will be like the previous one, and biodiversity informatics will seem no closer to getting its act together. Sure, we are putting more and more data online, but we are no closer to linking this stuff together, or building things that people can use to do cool science with.