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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.
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Published

Bob Mesibov (who has been a guest author on this blog) recently published a paper on data quality in in ZooKeys : In this paper Bob documents some significant discrepancies between data in his Millipedes of Australia (MoA) database and the equivalent data in the Atlas of Living Australia and GBIF (disclosure, I was a reviewer of the paper, and also sit on GBIF's science committee). This paper spawned a thread on TAXACOM, and also came

Published

This seems to be the season for big, arm-wavy documents about the future of biodiversity informatics (see A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities). An equivalent document is being drafted based on the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC 2012) conference.

Published

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.

Published

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.

Published

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.