Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’ Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.
Each year the grandly titled International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) publishes list of the top 10 species described in the previous year.
Déjà vu is a scary thing. Four years ago I released a mapping between names in TreeBASE and other databases called TBMap (described here: doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-158). Today I find myself releasing yet another mapping, as part of my NCBI to Wikipedia project. By embedding the mapping in a wiki, it can be edited, so the kinds of problems I encountered with TbMap, recounted here, here, and here.
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.
Continuing the theme of taxonomic classification in Wikipedia, I'm perversely delighted that Wikipedia demonstrates Gregg's paradox so nicely. The late John R. Gregg wrote several papers and a book exploring the logical structure of taxonomy.
In the previous post I suggested that a productive way to meet EOL's goal of a web page per taxon would be to build upon Wikipedia, rather than go it alone.
This post is likely to seem somewhat off the wall, given the rush to getting everything in the cloud, but it's Friday, so let's give it a whirl. One idea I've been toying with is dispensing with relational databases, wikis, etc. and just storing taxonomic data using files and folders on a disk.
Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below.
In the wiki examples I've been developing I've been trying to model names using the TDWG LSID vocabularies, particularly TaxonName. Roger Hyam has obviously put a huge amount of work into developing these, and they handle just about everything I need. However, I think that there's one thing missing, namely a way to express the logical relationship between the parts of a multinomial taxonomic name.
Reading a recent TAXACOM thread (Species Pages - purpose) my sense is that some people are arguing that "species pages" would be time consuming to create, aren't much good for taxonomists (to quote Mike Dallwitz "In brief, to make simplified and attractive information about taxa easily available to casual users?"), and nobody gets credit for making them.