Chris Freeland has written a thoughtful summary of his experiences of the two-day closed session to create a road map for biodiversity informatics, entitled #ebio09, silverbacks, & haiku.

This post is likely to seem somewhat off the wall, given the rush to getting everything in the cloud, but it's Friday, so let's give it a whirl.One idea I've been toying with is dispensing with relational databases, wikis, etc. and just storing taxonomic data using files and folders on a disk.

So, e-Biosphere '09 is over (at least for the plebs like me, the grown ups get to spend two days charting the future of biodiversity informatics). It was an interesting event, on several levels. It's late, and I'm shattered, so this post ill cover only a few things.This was first conference I'd attended where some of the participants twittered during proceedings.

I've put the slides for my e-Biosphere 09 challenge entry on SlideShare.e-Biosphere '09 ChallengeView more OpenOffice presentations from rdmpage.Not much information on the other entries yet, except for the eBiosphere Citizen Science Challenge, by Joel Sachs and colleagues, which will demonstrate a "global human sensor net". Their plan is to aggregate observations posted on Flickr, Twitter, Spotter, and email.

Over on the EOL blog is a summary of a meeting Visualizing the Evolutionary Tree of Life. This sounds like it was a fun meeting, but part of me is suffering from déjà vu. Our community has tossed this subject around for a while now.

e-Biosphere '09 kicks off next week, and features the challenge:Originally I planned to enter the wiki project I've been working on for a while, but time was running out and the deadline was too ambitious. Hence, I switched to thinking about RSS feeds. The idea was to first create a set of RSS feeds for sources that lack them, which I've been doing over at http://bioguid.info/rss, then integrate these feeds in a useful way.

For the last two days I've been participating in a NESCent meeting on Dryad, a "repository of data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolutionary biology and related fields". The aim of Dryad is to provide a durable home for the kinds of data that don't get captured by existing databases such as GenBank and TreeBASE (for example, the Excel spreadsheets, Word files, and tarballs of data that, if they are lucky, make it

Continuing with RSS feeds, I've now added wrappers around IPNI that will return for each plant family a list of names added to the IPNI database in the last 30 days. You can see the list at here.One thing which is a constant source of frustration for me is the disconnect between nomenclators (lists of published names for species) and scientific publishing.

Although I'd been thinking of getting the wiki project ready for e-Biosphere '09 as a challenge entry, lately I've been playing with RSS has a complementary, but quicker way to achieve some simple integration. I've been playing with RSS on and off for a while, but what reignited my interest was the swine flu timemap I made last week. The neatest thing about the timemap was how easy it was to make.

Tweets from @ attilacsordas and @stew alerted me to the Google Map of the H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak by niman.Ryan Schenk commented: "It'd be a million times more useful if that map was hooked into a timeline so you could see the spread.", which inspired me to knock together a timemap of swine flu. The timemap takes the RSS feed from niman's map and generates a timemap using Nick Rabinowitz's Timemap library.

Thinking about the GUID mess in biodiversity informatics, stumbling across some documents about the PILIN (Persistent Identifier Linking INfrastructure) project, and still smarting from problems getting hold of specimen data, I thought I'd try and articulate one solution.Firstly, I think biodiversity informatics has made the same mistake as digital librarians in thinking that people care where the get information from.