Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.

The Encylopedia of Life (EOL) has been relaunched, with a new look and much social media funkiness. I've been something of an EOL sceptic, but looking at the new site I think I can see what EOL is for. Ironically, it's not really about E. O. Wilson's original vision (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)00040-X:We still lack a decent database that does this.

Browsing Mendeley I found the following record: http://www.mendeley.com/research/description-larva/. This URL is for a paperwhich apparently has the DOI doi:10.1645/GE-2580.1. This is strange because Zootaxa doesn't have DOIs. The DOI given resolves to a paper in the Journal of Parasitology :Now, this paper has it's own record in Mendeley.OK, so this is weird..., but it gets weirder.

Some quick half-baked thoughts on citation matching. One of the things I'd really like to add to BioStor is the ability to parse article text and extract the list of literature cited.

Following on from my previous post on BHL apps and a Twitter discussion in which I appealed for a "sexier" interface for BHL (to which @elywreplied that is what BHL Australia were trying to do), here are some further thoughts on improving BHL's web interface. Build a new interface A fun project would be to create a BHL website clone using just the BHL API.

As part of a project to map taxonomic citations to bibliographic identifiers I'm tackling strings like this (from the ION record urn:lsid:organismnames.com:name:1405511 for Pseudomyrmex crudelis ):Systematics, biogeography and host plant associations of the Pseudomyrmex viduus group (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Triplaris- and Tachigali-inhabiting ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 126(4), August 1999: 451-540.

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.

Last week I was at the NSF "Assembling, Visualising and Analysing the Tree of Life" Ideas Lab, run by KnowInnovation.com/. It was an interesting experience, essentially a structured week of brainstorming ideas.One thing I came away with is the feeling that our notions of the "tree of life" are fuzzy, contradictory, and often probably unobtainable.

As part of the NSF "Assembling, Visualising and Analysing the Tree of Life" Ideas Lab that I took part in earlier this week I had an assessment of my "problem solving style" carried out using a service called FourSight.

Quick post on a little tool I came across, moz-hocr-edit. This Firefox add-on lets you proofread Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output.

The talks from the 2001 workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi 2011) are now available on Vimeo. There were some great talks at VizBi, especially the keynotes (the "featured videos" on the Vimeo page for VizBi).My own (slightly breathless) talk was on phylogeny visualisation, which you can watch below. Visualization of phylogenetics &