Over the last few months I've been exploring different ways to view scientific articles on the iPad, summarised here. I've also made a few prototypes, either from scratch (such as my response to the PLoS iPad app) or using Sencha Touch (see Touching citations on the iPad).Today, it's time for something a little different. The Sencha Touch framework I used earlier is huge and wasn't easy to get my head around.

This week saw the release of two tools from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, CiteBank and the BHL-Europe portal. Both have actually been quietly around for a while, but were only publicly announced last week.In developing a new tool there are several questions to ask. Does something already exist that meets my needs? If it doesn't exist, can I build it using an existing framework, or do I need to start from scratch?

Continuing my hobby horse of linking taxonomic databases to digitised literature, I've been working for the last couple of weeks on linking names in the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD) to articles in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). AFD is a list of all animals known to occur in Australia, and it provides much of the data for the recently released Atlas of Living Australia.

One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears to be due to some over-zealous attempts to de-duplicate documents.

Quick notes to self on fulltext search and CouchDB. Note that links to CouchDB are local to my machine(s),and won't work unless you are me, or have a copy of the same database running on your machine). CouchDB and Lucene adds fulltext indexing to CouchDB. After a few false starts I now have this working.

David ("Paddy") Patterson, Jerry Cooper, Paul Kirk, Rich Pyle, and David Remsen have published an article in TREE entitled "Names are key to the big new biology" (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004). The abstract states: Do we need names? Reading this (full disclosure, I was a reviewer) I can't wondering whether the assumption that names are key really needs to be challenged.

One of my hobby horses is the disservice taxonomic databases do their users by not linking to original scientific literature.

The bulk of the Biodiversity Heritage Library's content is available as DjVu files, which package together scanned page images and OCR text. Websites such as BHL or my own BioStor display page images, but there's no way to interact with the page content itself.

Not really a blog post, more a note to self. If I ever did get around to writing a book again, I think Scripting Life would be a great title.

The PLoS Biodiversity Hub has launched today. There's a PLoS blog post explaining the background to the project, as well as a summary on the Hub itself:Readers of iPhylo may recall my account of one of the meetings involved in setting up this hub, in which I began to despair about the lack of readiness of biodiversity informatics to provide much of the information needed for projects such as hubs.

Time (just) for a Friday folly. A couple of days ago the latest edition of the Catalogue of Life (CoL) arrived in my mailbox in the form of a DVD and booklet:While in some ways it's wonderful that the Catalogue of Life provides a complete data dump of its contents, this strikes me as a rather old-fashioned way to distribute it. So I began to wonder how this could be done differently, and started to think of CouchDB.