The BBC web site has an article entitled Giant deep sea jellyfish filmed in Gulf of Mexico which has footage of Stygiomedusa gigantea , and mentions an associated fish, Thalassobathia pelagica . One thing that frustrates me beyond belief is how hard it is to get more information about these organisms. Put another way, the biodiversity informatics community is missing a huge opportunity here.
Random half-formed idea time. Thinking about marking up an article (e.g., from PLoS) with a phylogeny (such as the image below, see doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001109.g001), I keep hitting the fact that existing web-based tree viewers are, in general, crap. Given that a PLoS article is an XML document, it would be great if the tree diagram was itself XML, in particular SVG.
At long last the peer-reviewed version of the paper "Enhanced display of scientific articles using extended metadata" (doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.03.004), in which I describe my entry in the Elsevier Grand Challenge, has finally appeared in the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web . The pre-print version of this paper has been online (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3173.1) for a year prior to appearance of the
The context for this post is the PLos markup meeting held at the California Academy of Sciences over the weekend (many thanks to Brian Fisher for the invitation). PLoS are launching a "biodiversity hub" and were looking for ideas on how to implement this.
The ability to create PDFs for the articles BioStor extracts from the Biodiversity Heritage Library has been the single most requested feature for BioStor. I've taken a while to get around to this -- for a bunch of reasons -- but I've finally added it today.
The TreeBASE team have announced that TreeBASE II has been released. I've put part of the announcement on the SSB web site. Given that TreeBASE and I have history, I think it best to keep quiet and see what others think before blogging about it in detail. Plus, there's a lot of new features to explore. Take it for a spin and see what you think.
Yesterday I fired off a stream of tweets, starting with: Various people commented on this, either on twitter or in emails, e.g.: So, to clarify, I'm not abandoning wikis. I'm just frustrated with the limitations of Semantic Mediawiki (SMW). Now, SMW is a great piece of software with some cool features.
This post is simply a quick note on some experiments with DjVu that I haven't finished. Much of BHL's content is available as DjVu files, which contain both the scanned images and OCR text, complete with co-ordinates of each piece of text. This means that it would, in principle, be trivial to lay out the bounding boxes of each text element on a web page.
Continuing the theme of ancient programs of mine still being used, I've been getting reports that the Windows version of TreeView won't install on Windows Vista and Windows 7. As with NDE, it's the installer that seems to be causing the problem.
Chris Freeland tweeted about the presentation he gave to a recent BHL meeting, the slides for which are reproduced below: BHL Tech Report View more presentations from chrisfreeland. It makes interesting viewing.