Holly Bik (@hollybik) has an opinion piece in PLoS Biology entitled "Let’s rise up to unite taxonomy and technology" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002231 (thanks to @sjurdur for bringing this to my attention). It's a passionate plea for integrating taxonomic knowledge and "omics" data.

I've just come back from II Iberian Congress of Biological Systematics (CISA2013) in Barcelona, where I had a great time.

This seems to be the season for big, arm-wavy documents about the future of biodiversity informatics (see A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities). An equivalent document is being drafted based on the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC 2012) conference.

BMC Ecology has published Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts' white paper on biodiversity informatics: Here are their 12 recommendations (with some comments of my own): Open Data, should be normal practice and should embody the principles of being accessible, assessable, intelligible and usable. Seems obvious, but data providers are often reluctant to open "their" data up for reuse. Data encoding should allow analysis across multiple

Next week I'm in Copenhagen for GBIC, the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference. The goal of the conference is to:The collaboration referred to is the agreement to mobilise data and informatics capability to met the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.I confess I have mixed feelings about the upcoming meeting. There will be something like 100 people attending the conference, with backgrounds ranging from pure science to intergovernmental policy.

Here is my presentation from today's Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond meeting. Open taxonomy View more presentations from Roderic PageAll the presentations will be posted online, along with podcasts of the audio. Meantime, presentations by Dave Remsen and Chris Freeland are already online.

Two papers estimating the total number of species have recently been published, one in the open access journal PLoS Biology :the second in Systematic Biology (which has an open access option but the authors didn't use it for this article): The first paper has gained a lot of attention, in part because Jonathan Eisen Bacteria &

Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.

The context for this post is the PLos markup meeting held at the California Academy of Sciences over the weekend (many thanks to Brian Fisher for the invitation). PLoS are launching a "biodiversity hub" and were looking for ideas on how to implement this.

Although I'd been thinking of getting the wiki project ready for e-Biosphere '09 as a challenge entry, lately I've been playing with RSS has a complementary, but quicker way to achieve some simple integration. I've been playing with RSS on and off for a while, but what reignited my interest was the swine flu timemap I made last week. The neatest thing about the timemap was how easy it was to make.