The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is open! From the official announcementFirst prize is €20,000, full details on prizes and entry requirements are on the Challenge web site.

Quick notes on an experimental feature I've added to BioNames. It attempts to identify possible taxonomic synonyms by extracting pairs of names with the same species name that appear together on the same page of text. The text could be full text for an open access article, OCR text from BHL, or the title and abstract for an article.

I'm going to the TDWG Identifier Workshop this weekend, so I thought I'd jot down a few notes.

The recent jump from ~11000 to ~17000 articles in JournalMap is mostly due to JournalMap ingesting content from my BioStor database.

Following on from the discussion of the African chameleon data, I've started to explore Angelique Hjarding's data in more detail. The data is available from figshare (doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.1141858), so I've grabbed a copy and put it in github. Several things are immediately apparent.There is a lot of ungeoreferenced data.

Just back from GB21, the GBIF Governing Board meeting (the first such meeting I've attended). It was in New Delhi, and this was also my first time in india, which is an amazing place.

My BioNames project has been going for over a year now, but I hadn't gotten around to providing bulk access to the data I've been collecting and cleaning. I've gone some way towards fixing this. You can now grab a snapshot of the BioNames database as a Darwin Core Archive here.

Note to self for upcoming discussion with JournalMap.As of Monday August 25th, BioStor has 106,617 articles comprising 1,484,050 BHL pages. From the full text for these articles, I have extracted 45,452 distinct localities (i.e., geotagged with latitude and longitude). 15,860 BHL pages in BioStor pages have at least one geotag, these pages belong to 5,675 BioStor articles.In summary, BioStor has 5,675 full-text articles that are geotagged.

This is guest post by Angelique Hjarding in response to discussion on this blog about the paper below.Thank you for highlighting our recent publication and for the very interesting comments. We wanted to take the opportunity to address some of the issues brought up in both your review and from reader comments. One of the most important issues that has been raised is the sharing of cleaned and vetted datasets.

If we view biodiversity data as part of the "biodiversity knowledge graph" then specimens are a fairly central feature of that graph. I'm looking at ways to link specimens to sequences, taxa, publications, etc., and doing this across multiple data providers.