This is a guest post by Tony Rees. It would be difficult to encounter a scientist, or anyone interested in science, who is not familiar with the microscope, a tool for making objects visible that are otherwise too small to be properly seen by the unaided eye, or to reveal otherwise invisible fine detail in larger objects.

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.

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

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Nico Franz and Beckett Sterner created a stir last year with a preprint in bioRxiv about expert validation (or the lack of it) in the "backbone" classifications used by aggregators.

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. According to w3techs, seven out of every eight websites in the Alexa top 10 million are UTF-8 encoded. This is good news for us screenscrapers, because it means that when we scrape data into a UTF-8 encoded document, the chances are good that all the characters will be correctly encoded and displayed. It's not quite good news for two reasons.

This guest post by Tony Rees describes his quest to track all genus names ever published (plus a subset of the species…). A “holy grail” for biodiversity informatics is a suitably quality controlled, human- and machine-queryable list of all the world’s species, preferably arranged in a suitable taxonomic hierarchy such as kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus or other.

The follow is a guest post by Bob Mesibov, who has contributed to iPhylo before. Like many iPhylo readers, I deal with large, pre-existing compilations of biodiversity data. The compilations come from museums, herbaria, aggregation projects and government agencies.

This guest post by Tony Rees explores some of the themes from his recent talk 10 years of Global Biodiversity Databases: Are We There Yet?. 10 years of global biodiversity databases: are we there yet?

The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov.

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.