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

Say what you will about Elsevier, they are certainly exploring ways to re-imagine the scientific article. In a comment on an earlier post Fabian Schreiber pointed out that Elsevier have released an app to display phylogenies in articles they publish. The app is based on jsPhyloSVGand is described here.

Published

Following on from the SVG experiments I've started to put some of the Javascript code for displaying phylogenies on Github. Not a repository yet, but as gists, little snippets of code. Mike Bostock has created http://bl.ocks.org/ which makes it possible to host gists as working examples, so you can play with the code "live". The first gist takes a Newick tree, parses it and displays a tree.

Published

The following poem by David Maddison was published in Systematic Biology (doi:10.1093/sysbio/sys057) under a CC-BY-NC license. I think that I shall never see A thing so awesome as the Tree That links us all in paths of genes Down into depths of time unseen; Whose many branches spreading wide House wondrous creatures of the tide, Ocean deep and mountain tall, Darkened cave and waterfall.

Published

Quick note to self about possible way to using fuzzy matching when searching for taxonomic names. Now that I'm using Cloudant to host CouchDB databases (e.g., see BioStor in the the cloud) I'd like to have a way to support fuzzy matching so that if I type in a name and misspelt it, there's a reasonable chance I will still find that name. This is the "did you mean?" feature beloved by Google users.

Published

Quick note on an experimental version of BioStor that is (mostly) hosted in the cloud. BioStor currently runs on a Mac Mini and uses MySQL as the database. For a number of reasons (it's running on a Mac Mini and my knowledge of optimising MySQL is limited) BioStor is struggling a bit. It's also gathered a lot of cruff as I've worked on ways to map article citations to the rather messy metadata in BHL.

Published

Benoît Fontaine et al. recently published a study concluding that average lag time between a species being discovered and subsequently described is 21 years. The paper concludes: This is a conclusion that merits more investigation, especially as the title of the paper suggests there is an appalling lack of efficiency (or resources) in the way we decsribe biodiversity.

Published

CrossRef have released CrossRef Metadata Search a nice tool that can take a free-form citation and return possible matches from CrossRef's database. If you get a match CrossRef can take the DOI and format for you it in a variety of styles using DOI content negotiation. If, like me, you spend a lot of time trying to find DOIs (and other identifiers) for articles by first parsing citations into their component parts, then this is good news.