In some recent posts I've been exploring the quality of GBIF's taxonomic data. I've done some further analyses and decided to write this up in something more than a blog post. I'm writing a draft which you can see on GitHub. It tackles just one issue, namely what happens when you combine taxonomic names from multiple sources and don't know that some of those names are synonyms.

A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor, and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxonomic legacy has appeared in Nature :Fascinating article, but as always I'm going to skip straight past the content and look at links. The article leads with Ptychozoon intermedium , the Philippine parachute gecko.

Bryan Drew and colleagues have published a piece in PLoS Biology bemoaning the lack of databased phylogenies: This is an old problem (see for example "Towards a Taxonomically Intelligent Phylogenetic Database" doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1028.1), but alas the solution proposed by Drew et al. is also old:In my opinion, as soon as you start demanding people do something you've lost the argument, and you're relying on power ("you don't get to publish

Notes on fonts in trying decipher some bat names (and sort out some synonyms). It can be difficult to tell "œ" (o + e) from "æ" (a + e) in some texts.

One feature I've always wanted to have in BioNames is a timeline of taxonomic names. ION has one (see here), but I wanted a way to go from the timeline to the actual publications.

Continuing the theme of the failings of the GBIF classification I've been playing further with cluster maps to visualise the problem (see this earlier post for an introduction).Browsing through bats in GBIF I keep finding the same species appearing more than once, albeit in different genera.

GBIF is asking for views on how it should license of data in the GBIF network. The full consultation document is available from Google Drive and DropBox.

Readers of this blog will know that I'm sceptical about the current value of linked data and RDF in biodiversity informatics. But I came across an interesting paper on RDF and biocuration that suggests a good "use case" for RDF in constructing and curating taxonomic databases.The paper is "Catching inconsistencies with the semantic web: a biocuration case study" (PDF here) by Jerven Bolleman and Sebastien Gehant.

In a previous post (Learning from eLife: GitHub as an article repository) I discussed the advantages of an Open Access journal putting its article XML in a version-controlled repository like GitHub. In response to that post Pensoft (the publisher of ZooKeys ) did exactly that, and the XML is available at https://github.com/pensoft/ZooKeys-xml.OK, "now what?" I hear you ask.

Since 2009 I've been running a service that takes posts to the EvolDir mailing list and sends them to a Twitter stream at @EvolDir. This service was running on a local machine which has died. Rather than wait until I rebuild that server (again), I looked around for other ways to recreate this service.