BMC Ecology has published Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts' white paper on biodiversity informatics: Here are their 12 recommendations (with some comments of my own): Open Data, should be normal practice and should embody the principles of being accessible, assessable, intelligible and usable. Seems obvious, but data providers are often reluctant to open "their" data up for reuse. Data encoding should allow analysis across multiple

Quick notes on "taxon concepts". In order to navigate through taxon names I plan to have at least one taxonomic classification in BioNames. GBIF makes the most sense at this stage. The model I'm adopting is that the classification is a graph where nodes have the id used by the external database (in this case GBIF). Each node has one or more names attached, and where possible the names are linked to the original description.

Donald Hobern drew my attention to nice the way iNaturalist displays taxonomic splits: In this example, observations identified as Rhipidura fuliginosa are being split into Rhipidura fuliginosa and Rhipidura albiscapa . This immediately reminds me of the idea which keeps circulating around, namely using version control tools to manage taxonomic classification.

Came across this paper recently:Despite QR Codes being uncool, there's something appealing about the idea of compressing a DNA barcode sequence into a small image.

I'm working on displaying OCR text from BHL using SVG, and these are just some quick notes on font size. Specifically how SVG font size corresponds to the size of letters, and how you work out what point size was used to print text on a BHL page.SVG font-size corresponds to the EM square of the font.

The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library includes articles extracted from BioStor, which is a step forwards in making the "legacy" biodiversity literature more accessible. But we still have some way to go. In particular the articles lack the obvious decoration of a modern article, the DOI.

On eof the things BioNames will need to do is match taxon names to classifications. For example, if I want to display a taxonomic hierarchy for the user to browse through the names, then I need a map between the taxon names that I've collected and one or more classifications. The approach I'm taking is to match strings, wherever possible using both the name and taxon authority.

One of the fun things about developing web sites is learning new tricks, tools, and techniques. Typically I hack away on my MacBook, and when something seems vaguely usable I stick it on a web server.

The new look Biodiversity Heritage Library has just launched. It's a complete refresh of the old site, based on the Biodiversity Heritage Library–Australia site. If you want an overview of what's new, BHL have published a guide to the new look site. Congrats to involved in the relaunch.One of the new features draws on the work I've been doing on BioStor.

One of the biggest pains (and self-inflicted wounds) in taxonomy is synonymy, the existence of multiple names for the same taxon. A common cause of synonymy is moving species to different genera in order to have their name reflect their classification.

Yet another taxonomic database, this time I can't blame anyone else because I'm the one building it (with some help, as I'll explain below).BioNames was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge (you can see the proposal here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92091). In that proposal I outlined my goal:The bulk of the funding from EOL is going into interface work by Ryan Schenk (@ryanschenk), author of synynyms among other cool things.