With somewhat depressing regularity I keep cycling back to things I was working on earlier but never quite get to work the way I wanted.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. No winner yet in the second Darwin Core Million for 2020, but there are another two and a half weeks to go (to 30 September). For details of the contest see this iPhylo blog post. And please don’t submit a million RECORDS, just (roughly) a million DATA ITEMS. That’s about 20,000 records with 50 fields in the table, or about 50,000 records with 20 fields, or something arithmetically similar.

I stumbled across this tweet yesterday (no doubt when I should have been doing other things), and disappeared down a rabbit hole. Emerging, I think the trip was worth it. Markdown wikis Among the tools listed by @zackfan01 were Obsidian and Roam, neither of which I heard of before.

A week ago Toby Hudson (@tobyhudson) released a very cool Chrome (and now Firefox) extension called Entity Explosion. If you install the extension, you get a little button you can press to find out what Wikidata knows about the entity on the web page you are looking at. The extension works on web sites that have URLs that match identifiers in Wikidata.

I'm giving a short talk at the Workshop On Open Citations And Open Scholarly Metadata 2020, which will be held online on September 9th.

Reading the GitHub issue Define objective rules for taxon concept identity referred to by Markus Döring in a comment on a previous post, I'm once again struck by the unholy mess generated by any discussion of "taxonomic concepts". The sense of déjà vu is overwhelming.

Continuing my struggles with taxa (see Taxonomic concepts continued: iNaturalist) I now turn to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD), which have perhaps the most fluid taxon identifiers ever.

Following on from my earlier post ("Taxonomic concepts for dummies"), Beckett Sterner commented: iNaturalist is interesting, but I'm not convinced that it is internally consistent. As a quick rule of thumb, I'm looking for patterns of how name changes relate to taxon identifier changes.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) adds "assertions" to Darwin Core occurrence records.

Motivated by the 2020 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge I've put together an interactive DNA barcode browser. The app is live at https://dna-barcode-browser.herokuapp.com. A naturalist from the 19th century would find little in GBIF that they weren’t familiar with. We have species in a Linnean hierarchy, their distributions plotted on a map.

[Work in progress] The "dummy" in this case is me. I'm trying to make sense of how to model taxa, especially in the context of linked data, and projects such as Wikidata where there is uncertainty over just what a taxon in Wikidata actually represents. There is also ongoing work by the TDWG Taxon Names and Concepts Interest Group. This is all very rough and I'm still working on this, but here goes.