My Taxonomic Search Engine is back online (mostly). This tool to search multiple databases for scientific names was another casualty of hacking. Having been developed under PHP 4, it needed some work to play nice with PHP 5. The changes were minor, and mainly concerned changes in code involving XPath and XSLT. I've commited these changes to SourceForge.
Dion Hinchcliffe has a piece entitled Creating real business value with Web 2.0 which lists AntBase.org (I think he actually means AntWeb) as an example of a non-commercial Web 2.0 service that demonstrates "scalable marshalling of underutilized data resources," and shows: The article comes with this graphic: See also Dion's Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen ways (via Danny Ayers).
CrossRef's OpenURL resolver can be used to find DOIs for papers, or give a DOI it can extract metadata.
A triple store for ants is all very well, but it contains just the information available when the triple store was created. What about updating it? What about doing this automatically ? Here are some ideas: Connotea Connotea provides semantically rich RSS feeds. We could subscribe to a feed using a tag (such as Formicidae), and extract recent posts.
stamen (which brought us Mappr) has a nice discussion of data visualisation.
Background In order to explore the promise of RDF and triple stores we need some large, interesting data sets.
From Nature's blog on web technology and science comes this post on Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI): and further Currently playing in iTunes: By the Time I Get to Phoenix by Glen Campbell
I'm slowly restoring the services offered by Darwin, after it was hacked.
Ambient Findability by Peter Morville is a wonderful read, full of snippets of inspiration. In many ways, like ambient music alluded to at the end of the book, it is less about specifics and more about a way of thinking, and about the possibilities once things become findable.
One of my lab's web servers was hacked last week.
Webdot isn't available for Mac OS X, and as I use an iBook running Panther for all my development work (before moving to a Linux box to host the results) I wanted to have the same functionality on my iBook. This can be achieved by hacking a simplified version of webdot. This Perl script creates a virtual web browser to serve the image. I've simplified things somewhat, but it works.