I've released a simple search engine for publications in Wikidata. Wikicite Search takes its name from the WikiCite project, which was an initiative to create a bibliographic database in Wikidata. Since bibliographic data is a core component of taxonomic research (arguably taxonomy is mostly tracing the fate of the "tags" we call taxonomic names) I've spent some time getting taxonomic literature into Wikidata.

In preparation for WikiCite 2017 I'm looking more closely at extracting bibliographic information from Wikispecies. The WikiCite project "is a proposal to build a bibliographic database in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects". One reason for doing this is so that each factual statement in WikiData can be linked to evidence for that statement.

Steve Baskauf has concluded a thoughtful series of blog posts on RDF and biodiversity informatics with http://baskauf.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/confessions-of-rdf-agnostic-part-7.html. In this post he discussed the "Rod Page Challenge", which was a series of grumpy posts I wrote (starting with this one) where I claimed RDF basically sucked, and to illustrate this I issued a challenge for people to do something interesting with some RDF I provided.

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One thing about the Encyclopedia of Life which bugs me no end is the awful way it displays the bibliography generated from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The image on the right shows the bibliography for the frog Hyla rivularis Taylor, 1952. It's one long, alphabetical list of pages. How can a user make sense of this?

Following on from adding specimens to my OpenURL resolver, I've added support for GenBank records. Either an OpenURL request such as http://bioguid.info/openurl?id=genbank:DQ502033, or the short URL http://bioguid.info/genbank/DQ502033 will resolve the GenBank record for accession number DQ502033.

Starting to get serious about the Grand Challenge. First step is to parse the XML data Elsevier made available. Sadly this is only for Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution for 2007, I would have liked the whole journal in XML to avoid hassles with parsing PDF. However, XML is not without it's own problems.