Inspired by a comment on my post Visualising edit history of a Wikipedia page, the code I use to make history flow diagrams like the one below is now in GitHub at https://github.com/rdmpage/wikihistoryflow.There is also a live version at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/wikihistoryflow.
Quick note to self in case I (inevitably) forget later. If you are using Apache mod_rewrite to make nice, clean URLs, and are also supporting JSONP, you may run into the situation where you have code that wants to append "?callback=xxx" to your URL (e.g., a cross-domain AJAX call in jQuery). Imagine you have a nice clean URL /user/123, which actually corresponds to user.php?id=123.
Recently I've been thinking about the best ways to make article-level metadata from BioStor more widely available. For example, for someone visiting the BHL site there is no easy way to find articles, which are the basic unit for much of the scientific literature. How hard would it be to add articles to BHL?
One thing I'm increasingly conscious of is that I've a lot of demos and toy projects hanging around and the code for most of these isn't readily available. So, I plan to clean these up and put them in GitHub so others can explore the code, and reuse it if they see fit.First up is the code to create a HTML+Javascript clone of Nature's iPhone app, as described in an earlier post.There's a live version of the clone here here.
Here is my presentation from today's Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting. Open taxonomy View more presentations from Roderic PageAll the presentations will be posted online, along with podcasts of the audio. Meantime, presentations by Dave Remsen and Chris Freeland are already online.
Tomorrow is the Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting.
Quick final comment on the TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?. As I noted in the previous post, Olivier Rovellotti (@orovellotti) and Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) have produced some nice visualisations of the frog data set:Nice as these are, I can't help feeling that they actually help make my point about the current state of RDF in biodiversity informatics.
This is a follow up to my previous post TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for? where I'm being, frankly, a pain in the arse, and asking why we bother with RDF? In many ways I'm not particularly anti-RDF, but it bothers me that there's a big disconnect between the reasons we are going down this route and how we are actually using RDF.
Last month, feeling particularly grumpy, I fired off an email to the TDWG-TAG mailing list with the subject Lobbing grenades: a challenge . Here's the email:In the context of the TDWG meeting (happening as we speak and which I'm following via Twitter, hashtag #tdwg) Joel Sachs asked me whether I had any specific data in mind that could form the basis of a discussion. So, here goes.
Bit late, but I stumbled across DeepDyve, which provides rental access to scientific papers for as little as $0.99. The pitch to publishers is:Renting a paper means you get to read it online, but you can't print or download it, and access is time limited (unless you purchase the article outright). You can also purchase monthly plans (think Spotify for papers).It's an interesting model, and the interface looks nice.
In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was.