The Encyclopedia of Life have announced the EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. The contest has two purposes:First prize is a trip to iEvoBio 2012, this year in Ottawa, Canada. For more details visit the challenge website. There is also an EOL community devoted to this challenge.Challenges are great things, especially ones with worthwhile tasks and decent prizes.

I've updated the BLAST a sequence and get a tree tool described in a previous post to output additional details, such as a list of the sequences used to build the tree and some basic metadata (such as the taxon name, name of any associated host, publication, and geographic coordinates). If the sequences are geotagged, then you will also see a little map showing the localities.

One thing which has always frustrated me about geophylogenies is how tedious they are to create. In theory, they should be pretty straightforward to generate. We take a tree, get point localities for each leaf in the tree, and generate the KML to display on Google Earth.

Google Refine is an elegant tool for data cleaning. One of its most powerful features is the ability to call "Reconciliation Services" to help clean data, for example by matching names to external identifiers. Google Refine comes with the ability to use Freebase reconciliation services, but you can also add external services. Inspired by this I've started to implement services to reconcile taxonomic names.

One of the things I find frustrating about TreeBASE is that there's no easy way to get an overview of what it contains. What is it's taxonomic coverage like? Is it dominated by plants and fungi, or are there lots of animal trees as well?

For this weeks sessions of my phyloinformatics course I'm developing some phylogeny tools. The first is a simple AJAX-based BLAST tool.

Quick note about a tool I've cobbled together as part of the phyloinformatics course, which addresses a long standing need I and others have to extract specimen codes from text. I've had this code kicking around for a while (as part of various never-finished data mining projects), but never got around to releasing it, until now.

As part of a postgraduate course here at the University of Glasgow I'm teaching five sessions on "phyloinformatics", which I've decided to define broadly enough to encompass most of biodiversity informatics.Given that this module is being developed on the fly, and will make use of lots of little "toys" I've developed and discussed on this blog, I've decided to put the course notes online, along with the interactive demos and the source code.

As part of a course on "phyloinformatics" that I'm about to teach I've been making some visualisations of classifications. Here's one I've put together using jQuery Mobile and the Encyclopedia of Life API. It's pretty limited, but is a simple way to explore EOL using three different classifications.

This message appeared on the TAXACOM mailing list:Given that most specimens lack resolvable digital identifiers (a theme I've harped on about before, most recently in the context of DNA barcoding), answering this kind of query ends up being a case of searching publications for text strings that contain the acronym of the collection.

Here are some quick notes on how BHL could use Mendeley as a "CiteBank". As a repository of bibliographic data If the goal is to assemble a "bibliography of life" then there are various ways this could be done. Taxon-specific bibliographies Create groups that are taxon-specific (or find existing groups in Mendeley.