In case I forget how to do this, and as an example of how easy it is to get sucked into a black hole of programming micro-details, I spent a hour or more trying to figure out how to handle Japanese characters.I'm building a database of publications linked to taxonomic names, and I'm interested in linking to electronic versions of those publications.
Found this while Googling. Demo by Perceptive Pixel of browsing the ITIS classification using their multi-touch technology. I want one...
As spotted by dechronization, GBIF has made public that Vince Smith has won the 2008 Ebbe Nielsen Prize.
Elsevier recently announced the 10 semi-finalists for their Grand Challenge. To my consternation, I'm one of them.
Time for some fun. In between some tedious text mining I've been meaning to explore some visualisations of NCBI. Here's the first, inspired by Jörn Clausen's wonderful Live Earthquake Mashup (thanks to Donat Agosti for telling me about this). What I've done is take all the frog sequences in Genbank that are georeferenced, add the date those Genbank records were created, generate a KML file, and use Nick Rabinowitz's timemap to plot the KML.
ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning : Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at
The good news is that the merger of Blackwell's digital content with that of Wiley's has not affected the DOIs, which is exactly as you'd expect, and is a nice demonstration of the power of identifiers that use indirection (although there was a time when Wiley was offline).For example, the article identified by doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x had the URLhttp://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00274.x and now has
Freebase Parallax is a very cool interface to Freebase. Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.
While biodiversity informatics putters along, generating loads of globally unique identifiers that nobody else uses, perhaps it's time to take a look at the bigger picture. DBPedia is an effort to extract data from Wikipedia and make it available as linked data. At the heart of this effort is the use of HTTP URIs to identify resources, and reusing those URIs.
