One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature.

The bulk of the Biodiversity Heritage Library's content is available as DjVu files, which package together scanned page images and OCR text. Websites such as BHL or my own BioStor display page images, but there's no way to interact with the page content itself.

Not really a blog post, more a note to self. If I ever did get around to writing a book again, I think Scripting Life would be a great title.

The PLoS Biodiversity Hub has launched today. There's a PLoS blog post explaining the background to the project, as well as a summary on the Hub itself: Readers of iPhylo may recall my account of one of the meetings involved in setting up this hub, in which I began to despair about the lack of readiness of biodiversity informatics to provide much of the information needed for projects such as hubs.

Time (just) for a Friday folly. A couple of days ago the latest edition of the Catalogue of Life (CoL) arrived in my mailbox in the form of a DVD and booklet: While in some ways it's wonderful that the Catalogue of Life provides a complete data dump of its contents, this strikes me as a rather old-fashioned way to distribute it. So I began to wonder how this could be done differently, and started to think of CouchDB.

When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the (Biodiversity heritage Library) I wanted people to be able to edit metadata and add references, but also minimise the chances that junk would get added. As a quick and dirty deterrent I used reCAPTCHA, so anybody adding a reference or editing the metadata had to pass a CAPTHCA before their edits were accepted.

@mikeal a little tedious. you can take OSM and then convert it to SHP and then http://github.com/maxogden/shp2geocouchless than a minute ago via web max ogden maxogden The tweet above inspired me to take a quick look at GeoCouch, a version of CouchDB that supports spatial queries. This is something I need if I'm going to start playing seriously with CouchDB.

Yesterday I uploaded a manuscript to Nature Precedings that describes the inner workings of BioStor.

@elyw I'd leave bookmarking to 3rd party, e.g. Mendeley. #bhlib specific issues incl.

Quick demo of the mockup I alluded to in the previous post. Here's a screen shot of the article "PhyloExplorer: a web server to validate, explore and query phylogenetic trees" (doi:10.1186/1471-2148-9-108) as displayed as a web-app on the iPad.