This is a quick sketch of a way to combine existing tools to help clean and annotate data in GBIF, particularly (but not exclusively) occurrence data. GitHub The data provider puts a Darwin Core Archive (expanded, not zipped) into a GitHub repository.

I've recently been appointed Chair of the Science Committee of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) http://www.gbif.org [1]. The committee is a small group of people with a range of backgrounds, and one of our roles is to advise GBIF on matters scientific (e.g., what kinds of data GBIF should collect?, what kinds of scientific questions should GBIF help answer?, etc.).There have been formal surveys (see the papers in the journal

One reason I was able to build BioNames is because a significant fraction of the taxonomic literature for animals is now online, either due to the efforts of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, digital archives, commercial publishers, or individual institutions and scientific societies. However there are still big gaps in literature availability.

Wednesday saw the launch of the Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO), based in large part on the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC). The aim is to provide a framework for biodiversity informatics and its applications in the hope that the field will unite around a shared vision of where we are and what needs to be done next:There is a web site http://www.biodiversityinformatics.org/ with more details and links to related

NESCent, EOL, and BHL have put together a research sprint:Since I won't be applying to participate I thought I'd sketch some possible ideas here. Co-occurrence of taxon names as proxy for ecological associations Some time ago I noted that if you build a "tag tree" for taxonomic names in a BHL document you can get some interesting patterns, such as the names of hosts and their parasites occurring together.

I've just come back from II Iberian Congress of Biological Systematics (CISA2013) in Barcelona, where I had a great time.

In some recent posts I've been exploring the quality of GBIF's taxonomic data. I've done some further analyses and decided to write this up in something more than a blog post. I'm writing a draft which you can see on GitHub. It tackles just one issue, namely what happens when you combine taxonomic names from multiple sources and don't know that some of those names are synonyms.

A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor, and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxonomic legacy has appeared in Nature :Fascinating article, but as always I'm going to skip straight past the content and look at links. The article leads with Ptychozoon intermedium , the Philippine parachute gecko.

Bryan Drew and colleagues have published a piece in PLoS Biology bemoaning the lack of databased phylogenies: This is an old problem (see for example "Towards a Taxonomically Intelligent Phylogenetic Database" doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1028.1), but alas the solution proposed by Drew et al. is also old: In my opinion, as soon as you start demanding people do something you've lost the argument, and you're relying on power ("you don't get to publish

Notes on fonts in trying decipher some bat names (and sort out some synonyms). It can be difficult to tell "œ" (o + e) from "æ" (a + e) in some texts.

One feature I've always wanted to have in BioNames is a timeline of taxonomic names. ION has one (see here), but I wanted a way to go from the timeline to the actual publications.