Sometimes it's just amazing/frightening how long a piece of software remains useful. I wrote Nexus Data Editor (NDE) in the late 1990's, mainly to keep my then PhD student Vince Smith happy.

At the end of day two of the GBIF LSID-GUID Task Group I put together this crude diagram to summarise some of the possible links between biodiversity data and the larger linked data cloud, which I, among others, have argued is where biodiversity informatics should be heading. Here's my hastily put together diagram (created using the wonderful OmniGraffle):I've put GBIF at the centre since we're at GBIF, and it's them we are trying to convince.

Following on from my previous post about Wikispecies (which generated some discussion on TAXACOM) I've played some more with Wikispecies. AS a first step I've added a Wikispecies RSS feed to my list of RSS feeds. This feed takes the original Wikispecies RSS feed for new pages (generated by the page Special:NewPages ) and tries to extract some details before reformatting it as an ATOM feed.

This post was prompted by Stephen Thorpe's post on TAXACOM about Wikispecies in which he wrote (in a thread discussing Roger Hyam's recent blog post) thatI beg to differ. Wikispecies runs on a database (the Mediawiki software uses a database to store the wiki), and Mediawiki can be thought of as a database of semi-structured text, but it lacks a lot of the functionality database users would expect.

I've added Index Fungorum to the list of RSS feeds that I generate at bioguid.info/rss.

Lately I've become more and more interested in moving data off my machine(s) and into the cloud.

This morning I posted this tweet: My grumpiness (on this occasion, seems lots of things seem to make me grumpy lately) is that often journal RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired. As RSS feeds are a major source of biodiversity information (for a great example of their use see uBio's RSS, described in doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm109) it would be helpful if publishers did a few basic things.

One thing I find myself doing a lot is creating Excel spreadsheets and filling them will lists of taxonomic names and bibliographic references, for which I then try to extract identifiers (such as DOIs). This is a tedious business, but the hope is that by doing it once I can create a useful resource.

Following on from the last post, I've now set up a trivial NCBI RDF service at bioguid.info/taxonomy/ (based on the ISSN resolver I released yesterday and announced on the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group).If you visit it in a web browser it's nothing special. However, if you choose to display XML you'll see some simple RDF.

Lately I've been returning to playing with RDF and triple stores. This is a serious case of déjà vu, as two blogs I've now abandoned will testify (bioGUID and SemAnt). Basically, a combination of frustration with the tools, data cleaning, and the lack of identifiers got in the way of making much progress.