A triple store for ants is all very well, but it contains just the information available when the triple store was created. What about updating it? What about doing this automatically ? Here are some ideas: Connotea Connotea provides semantically rich RSS feeds. We could subscribe to a feed using a tag (such as Formicidae), and extract recent posts.
stamen (which brought us Mappr) has a nice discussion of data visualisation.
Background In order to explore the promise of RDF and triple stores we need some large, interesting data sets.
From Nature's blog on web technology and science comes this post on Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI): and further Currently playing in iTunes: By the Time I Get to Phoenix by Glen Campbell
I'm slowly restoring the services offered by Darwin, after it was hacked.
Ambient Findability by Peter Morville is a wonderful read, full of snippets of inspiration. In many ways, like ambient music alluded to at the end of the book, it is less about specifics and more about a way of thinking, and about the possibilities once things become findable.
One of my lab's web servers was hacked last week.
Webdot isn't available for Mac OS X, and as I use an iBook running Panther for all my development work (before moving to a Linux box to host the results) I wanted to have the same functionality on my iBook. This can be achieved by hacking a simplified version of webdot. This Perl script creates a virtual web browser to serve the image. I've simplified things somewhat, but it works.
Pierre Lindenbaum has a very nice PHP script for generating Treemaps in SVG .
This paper in Genome Biology is a nice example of visualising relationships derived from PubMed: I've added it to my Connotea library under the tag visualisation (note to self: American English and British English spelling is just one of the problems with "tagging"). I'd seen this paper before, but "forgot" it until browsing Connotea and stumbling across nicmila's library. Nice illustration of the power of shared tags.
One of the things that keeps bothering me is the lack of compelling ways to visualise information in phylogenetic databases. Trees themselves are, I feel, pretty awful objects to work with. They are large, and displaying them takes up a lot of screen real estate. Yet, in many ways, the more one sees of the tree the less one gains from the experience.