Lately I've become more and more interested in moving data off my machine(s) and into the cloud.

This morning I posted this tweet: My grumpiness (on this occasion, seems lots of things seem to make me grumpy lately) is that often journal RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired. As RSS feeds are a major source of biodiversity information (for a great example of their use see uBio's RSS, described in doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm109) it would be helpful if publishers did a few basic things.

One thing I find myself doing a lot is creating Excel spreadsheets and filling them will lists of taxonomic names and bibliographic references, for which I then try to extract identifiers (such as DOIs). This is a tedious business, but the hope is that by doing it once I can create a useful resource.

Following on from the last post, I've now set up a trivial NCBI RDF service at bioguid.info/taxonomy/ (based on the ISSN resolver I released yesterday and announced on the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group).If you visit it in a web browser it's nothing special. However, if you choose to display XML you'll see some simple RDF.

Lately I've been returning to playing with RDF and triple stores. This is a serious case of déjà vu, as two blogs I've now abandoned will testify (bioGUID and SemAnt). Basically, a combination of frustration with the tools, data cleaning, and the lack of identifiers got in the way of making much progress.

In the previous post I suggested that a productive way to meet EOL's goal of a web page per taxon would be to build upon Wikipedia, rather than go it alone.

Time for more half-baked ideas. There's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about EOL, Linked Data (sometimes abbreviated LOD), and Wikipedia. Pete DeVries (@pjd) is keen on LOD, and has been asking why TDWG isn't playing in this space. I've been muttering dark thoughts about EOL, and singing the praises of Wikipedia.

The problem of displaying large taxonomic classifications on a web page continues to be an on again-off again obsession. My latest experiment makes use of Nicolas Garcia Belmonte's wonderful JavaScript Infovis Toolkit (JIT), which provides implementations of classic visualisations such as treemaps, hyperbolic trees, and SpaceTrees. SpaceTrees were developed at Maryland's HCIL lab, and that lab has applied them to biodiversity informatics.

Chris Freeland has written a thoughtful summary of his experiences of the two-day closed session to create a road map for biodiversity informatics, entitled #ebio09, silverbacks, & haiku.

This post is likely to seem somewhat off the wall, given the rush to getting everything in the cloud, but it's Friday, so let's give it a whirl.One idea I've been toying with is dispensing with relational databases, wikis, etc. and just storing taxonomic data using files and folders on a disk.

So, e-Biosphere '09 is over (at least for the plebs like me, the grown ups get to spend two days charting the future of biodiversity informatics). It was an interesting event, on several levels. It's late, and I'm shattered, so this post ill cover only a few things.This was first conference I'd attended where some of the participants twittered during proceedings.