tl;dr Readmill might be a great platform for shared annotation and correction of Biodiversity Heritage Library content.Thinking about accessing the taxonomic literature I started revisiting previous ideas.

We all have a "past" that we might not advertise widely, and my past includes flirting with panbiogeography.

Prompted by a conversation with Vince Smith at the recent Online Taxonomy meeting at the Linnean Society in London I've been revisiting touch-based displays of large trees. There are a couple of really impressive examples of what can be done. Perceptive Pixel I've blogged about this before, but came across another video that better captures the excitement of touch-based navigation of a taxonomy.

The release of the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Element) project has generated much discussion (see Fighting about ENCODE and junk). Perhaps perversely, I'm more interested in the way Nature has packaged the information than the debate about how much of our DNA is "junk." Nature has a website (http://www.nature.com/encode/) that demonstrates the use of "threads" to navigate through a set of papers.

Quick note that as much as I like that the Biodiversity Heritage Library is using DOIs, they are generating them for publications that already have them (or are acquiring them from other sources). For example, here are the two DOIs for the same article (formatted using the DOI Citation Formatter), one from BHL and one from the Smithsonian:The BHL DOI resolves to a page in BHL, the other DOI resolves to the a page in the Smithsonian Digital

Google's Knowledge Graph can enhance search results by display some structured information about a hit in your list of results. It's available in the US (i.e., you need to use www.google.com, although I have seen it occasionally appear for google.co.uk.Here is what Google displays for Eidolon helvum (the straw-coloured fruit bat). You get a snippet of text from Wikipedia, and also a map from the BBC Nature Wildlife site.

If we are ever going to link biodiversity data together we need to have some way of ensuring persistent links between digital records. This isn't going to happen unless people take persistent identifiers seriously.I've been trying to link specimen codes in publications to GBIF, with some success, so imagine my horror when it started to fall apart.

Half-baked idea time. Thinking about projects such as the Earth Microbiome Project and Genomic Observatories, the recent GBIC2012 meeting (I'm still digesting that meeting), and mulling over the book A Vast Machine I keep thinking about the possible parallels between climate science and biodiversity science.

Quick thoughts on the recent announcement by figshare and F1000 about the new journals being launched on the F1000 Research site. The articles being published have data sets embedded as figshare widgets in the body of the text, instead of being, say, a static table. For example, the article:has a widget that looks like this:You can interact with this widget to view the data.

Was going to post this as a comment on the BHL blog but they use Blogger's native comment system, which is horrible, and it refused to accept my comment (yes, yes, I'm sure it did that on grounds of taste). I read the recent post Building a BHL Africa and couldn't believe my eyes when I read the following:CDs! Really?