Just some random thoughts on creating searchable PDFs for article extracted from BHL.

In Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Nine Billion Names of God Tibetan monks hire two programmers to help them generate all the the possible names of God. The monks believe that the purpose of the Universe is to generate those names, once that goal is achieved the Universe will end.

As part of a project to build a tool to navigate through taxonomic names and classifications I've become interested in quick ways to compare classifications.

One visualisation method I keep coming back too is the treemap.

While exploring ways to visually compare classifications I came across the Australian snake name Demansia atra , and ended up reading a series of papers in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature discussing the status of the name (more fun than it sounds, trust me). For example, Smith and Wallach Case 2920.

In response to Rutger Vos's question I've started to add GBIF taxon ids to the iPhylo Linkout website. If you've not come across iPhylo Linkout, it's a Semantic Mediawiki-based site were I maintain links between the NCBI taxonomy and other resources, such as Wikipedia and the BBC Nature Wildlife finder. For more background seePage, R. D. M. (2011). Linking NCBI to Wikipedia: a wiki-based approach. PLoS Currents, 3, RRN1228.

There's a recent thread on the Encyclopedia of Life concerning erroneous images for the crab Leptograpsus . This is a crab I used to chase around rooks on stormy west-coast beaches near Auckland, so I was a little surprised to see the EOL page for Leptograpsus looks like this:The name and classification is the crab, but the image is of a fish ( Lethrinus variegatus ). Perhaps at some point in aggregating the images the two

This post arose from an ongoing email conversation with Tony Rees about extracting and annotating taxonomic names. In BioStor I use the GBIF classification to display the taxonomic names found in the OCR text in the form of a tree. The idea is to give the reader a sense of "what the paper is about". I also use the classification to help link to GBIF occurrence records.

In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

Dark taxa have become even darker. NCBI has pulled the plug on large numbers of DNA barcode sequences that lack scientific names. For example, taxon Cyclopoida sp. BOLD:AAG9771 (tax_id 818059) now has a sparse page that has no associated sequences. From an earlier download of EMBL I know that this taxon is associated with at least 5 sequences, such as GU679674. But if you go to that sequence you get this:So the the sequence is hidden.

Based on recent discussions my sense is that our community will continue to thrash the issue of identifiers to death, repeating many of the debates that have gone on (and will go on) in other areas. To be trite, it seems to me we have three criteria: cheap , resolvable , and persistent . We get to pick two. Cheap and resolvable means URLs, which everybody is nervous about because they break.