David Attenborough’s latest homage to biodiversity, Blue Planet II is, as always, visually magnificent. Much of its impact derives from the new views of life afforded by technological advances in cameras, drones, diving gear, and submersibles. One might hope that the supporting information online reflected the equivalent technological advances made in describing and sharing information. Sadly, this is not the case.

A post by on the Plaza blog Expanded access to images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository has prompted me to write up a little toy I created earlier this week. The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a repository of taxonomic papers hosted by Zenodo. Where possible Plazi have extracted individual images and added those to the BLR, even if the article itself is not open access.

Notes on how many georeferenced DNA sequences there are in GenBank, and how many could potentially be georeferenced.

Day three of TDWG 2017 highlighted some of the key obstacles facing biodiversity informatics. After a fun series of "wild ideas" (nobody will easily forget David Bloom's "Kill your Darwin Core darlings") we had a wonderful keynote by Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) entitled "Everything happens somewhere, multiple times". Javier is CEO and founder of Carto, which provides tools for amazing geographic visualisations.

I gave a "wild ideas" talk at TDWG17 suggesting that the biodiversity community use Bitcoin to make micropayments to use data.

Some random notes on the first day of TDWG 2017. First off, great organisation with the first usable conference calendar app that I've seen (https://tdwg2017.sched.com). I gave the day's keynote address in the morning (slides below). Towards a biodiversity knowledge graph from Roderic Page It was something of a stream of consciousness brain dump, and tried to cover a lot of (maybe too much) stuff.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Do you know the party game "Telephone", also known as "Chinese Whispers"? The first player whispers a message in the ear of the next player, who passes the message in the same way to a third player, and so on. When the last player has heard the whispered message, the starting and finishing versions of the message are spoken out loud. The two versions are rarely the same.

Holly Bik (@hollybik) has an opinion piece in PLoS Biology entitled "Let’s rise up to unite taxonomy and technology" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002231 (thanks to @sjurdur for bringing this to my attention). It's a passionate plea for integrating taxonomic knowledge and "omics" data.

Notes to self on web map-style tree viewers. The basic idea is to use Google Maps or Leaflet to display a tree. Hence we need to compute tiles. One approach is to use a database that supports spatial queries to store the x,y coordinates of the tree. When we draw a tile we compute the coordinates of that tile, based on position and zoom level, do a spatial query to extract all lines that intersect with the rectangle for that tile, and draw those.

I've been viewing Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video from 1987 and it's striking how much of this we have today, and yet how far away we are from the complete vision. For some background on this promotional video see The Making of Knowledge Navigator.

Nico Franz and Beckett W. Sterner recently published a preprint entitled "To Increase Trust, Change the Social Design Behind Aggregated Biodiversity Data" on bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/157214 Below is the abstract: Below I respond to some specific points that annoyed me about this article, at the end I try and sketch out a more constructive response.