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.

When I first launched BioStor (an article finding tool built on the top of the (Biodiversity heritage Library) I wanted people to be able to edit metadata and add references, but also minimise the chances that junk would get added.

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Yesterday I uploaded a manuscript to Nature Precedings that describes the inner workings of BioStor.

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Quick demo of the mockup I alluded to in the previous post. Here's a screen shot of the article "PhyloExplorer: a web server to validate, explore and query phylogenetic trees" (doi:10.1186/1471-2148-9-108) as displayed as a web-app on the iPad.

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In previous articles I've looked at how various apps display scientific articles. The apps I looked at were:PLoS ReaderNaturePapersMendeleySo, where next? As Ian Mulvany noted in a comment on an earlier post, I haven't attempted to summarise the best user interface metaphors for navigation. Rather than try and do that in the abstract, I'd like to create some prototypes to play with various ideas.

Dario Taraborelli has released ReaderMeter, an elegant app built on top of the Mendeley API. You enter an author's name and it summarises that authorship's readership in Mendeley.

Apple's iBooks app is an ePub and PDF reader, and one could write a lengthy article about its interface. However, in the context of these posts on visualising the scientific article there's one feature that has particularly struck me. When reading a book that cited other literature the citations are hyper-links: click on one and iBooks forwards you (via the page turning effect) to the reference in the book's bibliography.

Previously I've looked at the Nature, PLoS, and Papers apps, now it's the turn of the Mendeley iPad app.