Continuing the Friday folly theme, below is a screencast of a linked data browser that uses the same ideas as last week's screencast, but uses a custom browser I've written to display the results in a more user-friendly way. Linking the data together from Roderic Page on Vimeo. The demo is live, you can view it at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/browser/www/uri/http://bioguid.info/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001787.

I've written a note on the Wikipedia Taxobox page making the case for adding NCBI taxonomy IDs to the standard Taxobox used to summarise information about a taxon. Here is what I wrote: Some discussion has ensued on the Taxobox page, all positive. I'm blogging this here to encourage anyone who as any more thoughts on the matter to contribute to the discussion.

Cooliris is a web browser plugin that can display a large number of images as a moving "infinite" wall. It's Friday, so for fun I added a media RSS feed to BioStor to make the BHL page scans available to Cooliris.

Time for a Friday folly. I've made a clunky screencast showing an example of linking biodiversity data together, using bioGUID as the universal wrapper around various data sources. I started with GenBank sequence EF013683, added another, EF013555, then explored some links (specimen, publication, taxon, journal), using the OpenLink RDF Browser: Linking biodiversity data from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

Some serious displacement activity. I'm toying with adding phylogenies to iSpecies, probably sourced from the PhyLoTA browser. This raises the issue of how to display trees on a web page. PhyLoTA itself uses bitmap images, such as this one: but I'd like to avoid bitmaps. I toyed with using SVG, but that has it's own series of issues (it basically has to be served as a separate file). So, I've spent a couple of hours playing with the element.

I've just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to find a reference in BioStor. The reference in question is and comes from the Reptile Database page for the gecko Phyllodactylus gilberti HELLER, 1903. This is primary database for reptile taxonomy, and supplies the Catalogue of Life, which repeats this reference verbatim. Thing is, this reference doesn't exist! Page 39 of Proc. Biol. Soc.

I'm in the midst of rebuilding iSpecies (my mash-up of Wikipedia, NCBI, GBIF, Yahoo, and Google search results) with the aim of outputting the results in RDF. The goal is to convert iSpecies from a pretty crude "on-the-fly" mash-up to a triple store where results are cached and can be queried in interesting ways. Why?

Thinking about next steps for my BioStor project, one thing I keep coming back to is the problem of how to dramatically scale up the task of finding taxonomic literature online. While I personal find it oddly therapeutic to spend a little time copying and pasting citations into BioStor's OpenURL resolver and trying to find these references in BHL, we need something a little more powerful.

To much fanfare (e.g., Nature News , "Linnaeus meets the Internet" doi:10.1038/news.2010.221), on May 5th PLoS ONE published Sandy Knapp's "Four New Vining Species of Solanum (Dulcamaroid Clade) from Montane Habitats in Tropical America" doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010502.

Mendeley have called for proposals to use their forthcoming API. The API will publicly available soon, but in a clever move Mendeley will provide early access to developers with cool ideas.