Each year about this time, as I ponder what to devote my time on in the coming year, I get exasperated and frustrated that each year will be like the previous one, and biodiversity informatics will seem no closer to getting its act together. Sure, we are putting more and more data online, but we are no closer to linking this stuff together, or building things that people can use to do cool science with.

The journal Mycokeys has published the following paper:This paper contains a diagram that seems innocuous enough but which I find worrying:The nodes in the graph are "biodiversity megascience platforms", the edges are "cross-linkages and data exchange". What bothers me is that if you view biodiversity informatics through this lens then the relationships among these projects becomes the focus.

I'll keep this short: LSIDs suck because they are so hard to set up that many LSIDs don't actually work. Because of this there seems to be no shame in publishing "fake" LSIDs (LSIDs that look like LSIDs but which don't resolve using the LSID protocol). Hey, it's hard work, so let's just stick them on a web page but not actually make them resolvable.

I've been playing a little with TreeBASE II, and the more I do the more I want to pull my hair out. Broken URLs The old TreeBASE had a URL API, which databases such as NCBI made use of. For example, the NCBI page for Amphibolurus nobbi has a link to this taxon in TreeBASE.

It's Friday, so time for either a folly or a rant. BHL have put another user survey into the field http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BHLsurvey. I loathe user surveys.

I'm in the US on UK time, so this is probably a bad idea to write this, but the paper by Malte Ebach et al. ("O Cladistics, Where Art Thou?", doi:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2008.00225.x) in the latest Cladistics just annoys me too much.