Quick final comment on the TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?. As I noted in the previous post, Olivier Rovellotti (@orovellotti) and Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) have produced some nice visualisations of the frog data set:Nice as these are, I can't help feeling that they actually help make my point about the current state of RDF in biodiversity informatics.

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.

Last month, feeling particularly grumpy, I fired off an email to the TDWG-TAG mailing list with the subject Lobbing grenades: a challenge . Here's the email:In the context of the TDWG meeting (happening as we speak and which I'm following via Twitter, hashtag #tdwg) Joel Sachs asked me whether I had any specific data in mind that could form the basis of a discussion. So, here goes.

Bit late, but I stumbled across DeepDyve, which provides rental access to scientific papers for as little as $0.99. The pitch to publishers is:Renting a paper means you get to read it online, but you can't print or download it, and access is time limited (unless you purchase the article outright). You can also purchase monthly plans (think Spotify for papers).It's an interesting model, and the interface looks nice.

In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was.

Following on from the last post How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data? another interesting paper has appeared in TREE:The paper analyses the "ecology and social habits of taxonomists" and concludes:Queue flame war on TAXACOM, no doubt, but it's a refreshing conclusion, and it's based on actual data. Here I declare an interest.

Two papers estimating the total number of species have recently been published, one in the open access journal PLoS Biology :the second in Systematic Biology (which has an open access option but the authors didn't use it for this article): The first paper has gained a lot of attention, in part because Jonathan Eisen Bacteria &

DOIs are meant to be the gold standard in bibliographic identifier for article. They are not supposed to break. Yet some publishers seem to struggle to get them to work. In the past I've grumbled about BioOne, Wiley, and others as cuplrits with broken or duplicate or disappearing DOIs.Today's source of frustration is Taylor and Francis Online.

OK, a bit of hyperbole in the morning. One of the goals of RDF is to create the Semantic Web, an interwoven network of data seamlessly linked by shared identifiers and shared vocabularies. Everyone uses the same identifiers for the same things, and when they describe these things they use the same terms. Simples.Of course, the reality is somewhat different.

I've been spending a lot of time recently mapping bibliographic citations for taxonomic names to digital identifiers (such as DOIs). This is tedious work at the best of times (despite lots of automation), but it is not helped but the somewhat Orwellian practices of some publishers. Occasionally when an established journal gets renamed the publisher retrospectively applies that name to the previous journal.