Computer and Information SciencesBlogger

iPhylo

Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188. Written content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Home PageAtom FeedMastodonISSN 2051-8188
language
Published

One of the things I'm enjoying about the Australian Faunal Directory on CouchDB is the chance to play with some ideas without worrying about breaking lots of code or, indeed, upsetting any users ('cos, let's face it, there aren't any). As a result, I can start to play with ideas that may one day find their way into other projects. One of these ideas is to use quantum treemaps to display an author's publications.

Published

This week saw the release of two tools from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, CiteBank and the BHL-Europe portal. Both have actually been quietly around for a while, but were only publicly announced last week. In developing a new tool there are several questions to ask. Does something already exist that meets my needs? If it doesn't exist, can I build it using an existing framework, or do I need to start from scratch?

Published

Continuing my hobby horse of linking taxonomic databases to digitised literature, I've been working for the last couple of weeks on linking names in the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD) to articles in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). AFD is a list of all animals known to occur in Australia, and it provides much of the data for the recently released Atlas of Living Australia.

Published

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.