One of the most interesting aspects of EOL is "TraitBank", which has been described in a recent paper: TraitBank is available in JSON-LD, and so is potentially part of the Semantic Web.

Each year about this time, as I ponder what to devote my time on in the coming year, I get exasperated and frustrated that each year will be like the previous one, and biodiversity informatics will seem no closer to getting its act together. Sure, we are putting more and more data online, but we are no closer to linking this stuff together, or building things that people can use to do cool science with.

Jonathan Eisen recently wrote that the PLOS Hub for Biodiversity is soon to be retired, and sure enough it's vanished from the web (the original URL hubs.plos.org/web/biodiversity/ now bounces you straight to http://www.plosone.org/, you can still see what it looked like in the Wayback Machine). Like Jonathan, I was involved in the hub, which was described in the following paper: In retrospect PLoS's decision to pull the hub is not surprising.