Elsevier recently announced the 10 semi-finalists for their Grand Challenge. To my consternation, I'm one of them.

Time for some fun. In between some tedious text mining I've been meaning to explore some visualisations of NCBI. Here's the first, inspired by Jörn Clausen's wonderful Live Earthquake Mashup (thanks to Donat Agosti for telling me about this). What I've done is take all the frog sequences in Genbank that are georeferenced, add the date those Genbank records were created, generate a KML file, and use Nick Rabinowitz's timemap to plot the KML.

ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at

The good news is that the merger of Blackwell's digital content with that of Wiley's has not affected the DOIs, which is exactly as you'd expect, and is a nice demonstration of the power of identifiers that use indirection (although there was a time when Wiley was offline). For example, the article identified by doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x had the URL http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x and now has

Freebase Parallax is a very cool interface to Freebase. Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

While biodiversity informatics putters along, generating loads of globally unique identifiers that nobody else uses, perhaps it's time to take a look at the bigger picture. DBPedia is an effort to extract data from Wikipedia and make it available as linked data. At the heart of this effort is the use of HTTP URIs to identify resources, and reusing those URIs. Hence, for many concepts DBpedia URIs are the default option.

The proceedings of the BNCOD 2008 Workshop on "Biodiversity Informatics: challenges in modelling and managing biodiversity knowledge" are online. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 25th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD 2008) at Cardiff, Wales. The papers make interesting reading.

Shameless plug. One of my former PhD students, Katie Davis, is second author on "Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution" (doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0715), which came out recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society . The abstract: Now, if we could just get the bird supertree paper out the door...

Systematics makes The Colbert Report. The paper describing Aptostichus stephencolbertio by Jason Bond and Amy Stockman has been published in Systematic Biology doi:10.1080/10635150802302443. Jason described also described Aptostichus angelinajolieae in the same paper, but I guess she is otherwise engaged.

Given that the clones are hot on my heels, I feel the need to add more bells and whistles to iSpecies. The first new feature is automated tagging, and uses Yahoo's Term Extraction API.

One of my pet peeves is how backward natural history museums are in grasping the possibilities the Internet raises. Most electronic displays in museums have low information content, and are doomed to obsolescence. Traditional media (plaques, labels) have limited space, and also date quickly.