This is a follow up to my previous post TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for? where I'm being, frankly, a pain in the arse, and asking why we bother with RDF? In many ways I'm not particularly anti-RDF, but it bothers me that there's a big disconnect between the reasons we are going down this route and how we are actually using RDF.

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.

Now we'll bring the awesome. Mendeley have announced The Mendeley API Binary Battle, with a first prize of $US 10,0001, and some very high-profile judges (Juan Enriquez, Tim O'Reilly, James Powell, Werner Vogels, and John Wilbanks). Deadline for submission is August 31st 2011, with the results announced in October. The criterion for judging are:How active is your application? We’ll look at your API key usage.How viral is the app?

One issue I'm running into with Mendeley is that it can create spurious documents, mangling my references in the process. This appears to be due to some over-zealous attempts to de-duplicate documents.

At long last the peer-reviewed version of the paper "Enhanced display of scientific articles using extended metadata" (doi:10.1016/j.websem.2010.03.004), in which I describe my entry in the Elsevier Grand Challenge, has finally appeared in the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web . The pre-print version of this paper has been online (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3173.1) for a year prior to appearance of the

So, e-Biosphere '09 is over (at least for the plebs like me, the grown ups get to spend two days charting the future of biodiversity informatics). It was an interesting event, on several levels. It's late, and I'm shattered, so this post ill cover only a few things.This was first conference I'd attended where some of the participants twittered during proceedings.

I've put the slides for my e-Biosphere 09 challenge entry on SlideShare.e-Biosphere '09 ChallengeView more OpenOffice presentations from rdmpage.Not much information on the other entries yet, except for the eBiosphere Citizen Science Challenge, by Joel Sachs and colleagues, which will demonstrate a "global human sensor net". Their plan is to aggregate observations posted on Flickr, Twitter, Spotter, and email.

e-Biosphere '09 kicks off next week, and features the challenge:Originally I planned to enter the wiki project I've been working on for a while, but time was running out and the deadline was too ambitious. Hence, I switched to thinking about RSS feeds. The idea was to first create a set of RSS feeds for sources that lack them, which I've been doing over at http://bioguid.info/rss, then integrate these feeds in a useful way.

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.

The e-Biosphere meeting in London June 1-3 has announced a The e-Biosphere 09 Informatics Challenge:The "real time" aspect of the challenge seems a bit forced.