I've added an experimental feature to BioStor that uses data from Wikidata and Wikispecies to augment what information BioStor displays on authors.

Given a big corpus of literature one of the fun things to do is look at how the use of a term has changed over time. When did people first use a particular word? When did one word start to replace another, etc.? Google's Ngram Viewer is perhaps the best known tool for exploring these questions.

Following on from adding DNA barcodes to GBIF I've now uploaded a taxonomic classification of DNA barcode BINs (Barcode Index Numbers). Each BIN is a cluster of similar DNA barcodes that is essentially equivalent to a species.

I've uploaded all the COI barcodes in the iBOL public data dumps into GBIF. This is an update of an earlier project that uploaded a small subset. Now that dataset doi:10.15468/inygc6 has been expanded to include some 2.7 million barcodes.

Continuing my on-again off-again relationship with the Semantic Web, I stumbled across a cool approach to visualising the results of SPARQL queries.

Willi Egloff, Donat Agosti, Puneet Kishor, David Patterson, and Jeremy A. Miller have published an interesting preprint entitled “Copyright and the Use of Images as Biodiversity Data” DOI:10.1101/087015 in which they argue that taxonomic images aren't copyrightable. I'm not convinced, and have commented on the bioRxiv site.

One of the most interesting aspects of EOL is "TraitBank", which has been described in a recent paper: TraitBank is available in JSON-LD, and so is potentially part of the Semantic Web.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. According to w3techs, seven out of every eight websites in the Alexa top 10 million are UTF-8 encoded. This is good news for us screenscrapers, because it means that when we scrape data into a UTF-8 encoded document, the chances are good that all the characters will be correctly encoded and displayed. It's not quite good news for two reasons.

The GBIF 2016 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge has received 15 submissions. You can view them here: Unlike last year where the topic was completely open, for the second challenge we've narrowed the focus to "Analysing and addressing gaps and biases in primary biodiversity data". As with last year, judging is limited to the jury (of which I'm a member), however anyone interested in biodiversity informatics can browse the submissions.

This guest post by Tony Rees describes his quest to track all genus names ever published (plus a subset of the species…). A “holy grail” for biodiversity informatics is a suitably quality controlled, human- and machine-queryable list of all the world’s species, preferably arranged in a suitable taxonomic hierarchy such as kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus or other.

David Schindel and colleagues recently published a paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal : The paper is a call for the community to help grow a database (GRBio) on biodiversity repositories, a database that will "will require community input and curation". Reading this, I'm struck by the lack of a clear sense of what that community might be. In particular: who is this database for, and who is most likely to build it? I suspect that