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.

Stumbled across Zitgist (via UMBEL), and thought the diagram above was so cool I'd have to blog about it. Zitgist is one of a growing number of Semantic Web companies, specialising in Linked Data. This topic is dear to my heart, so I'll need to keep an eye on what Zitgist and others are up to.

Interesting paper by Huss et al. in PLoS Biology entitled "A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function" (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060175). Essentially, the paper describes using Wikipedia to create a comprehensive gene wiki: Given that the EOL project seems stalled (i.e., the current content hasn't changed), and the existing Wikipedia content is often much richer than EOL's, one has to ask why EOL doesn't give up it's current model

Brian de Alwis has written a cool Apple Script called OpenDOI that adds support for resolving doi: and hdl: URLs using Safari on a Mac. With it installed, links such as hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1 and doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022 become clickable, without having to stick a HTTP proxy in front of them. Seems that an obvious extension to this would be to add support for LSIDs.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but on of the great things about putting stuff online is that it may be useful to other people. What seems like ages ago I developed the Glasgow Taxonomic Name Server to experiment with searching for and display taxonomic names and classifications. As part of that work I developed a SOAP web service, and wrote a tutorial on how to use SOAP from within Microsoft Excel.

Rich Glor brought dechronization to my attention. This is a very active blog "by junior academic scientists whose research focuses on evolution, reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, and comparative methods." There's some nice stuff there, including software reviews, paper appraisals, conference reports, and *cough* porn.

Just a quick not to make a link between David Shorthouse's post about taxonomic consensus and distributed version control (Taxonomic Consensus as Software Creation), and Galen Charlton's article in The Code4Lib Journal (Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata). Some interesting food for thought here. Both mention Git.

Stumbled across the cool AgeNames service, described on the stratigraphy.net blog. Agenames takes some text and extracts stratigraphic terms from text. For example, it will extract geological time periods from text. It's a geological equivalent of uBio's taxonomic name extraction services. It would be fun to play with this as part of the iPhylo project.

Nice paper by Robert Huber and Jens Klump has appeared in Computers & Geosciences entitled "Charting taxonomic knowledge through ontologies and ranking algorithms" (doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2008.02.016). The paper is not open access, but you can get some background from the post How TaxonRank works. Here's the abstract.

Lab Times has an interesting article by Ralf Neumann that analyses Europe's publications in evolutionary biology for the period 1996-2006. On page 36 there is a table of the 30 most cited authors in Europe, and the top five most cited papers.

Mauro Cavalcanti has released e-Species, "a taxonomically intelligent biodiversity search engine" written in Python that mimics much of the functionality of iSpecies. The project is open source, with a SourceForge page, although no files seem to be available yet. This is the second iSpecies clone I've seen, David Shorthouse having written a clone that uses only JSON.