Short URLs have been a topic of discussion recently, perhaps sparked by the article URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?. Many will have encountered short URLs in Twitter tweets. Leigh Dodds (@ldodds) askedI guess Leigh's talking about the need for short URLs in tweets, but I wonder about the more general question of why we need URL shorteners at all.
The LSID discussion rumbles on (see my earlier post). One issue that has re-emerged is the use of HTTP proxies in RDF documents.
The e-Biosphere online forum has a topic entitled Why open source code?
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.
My British Library Talk Science presentation is now available online as a podcast.
Here's the video of my talk at the NHM (courtesy of Vince Smith).Going Digital - by Rod Page from Vince Smith on Vimeo.
Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below.
I'm slowing trying to get phylogenies into the wiki that I'm playing with. Here's an early example, the TreeBASE tree T6002, from the study A Phylogenomic Study of Birds Reveals Their Evolutionary History. The tree is displayed using my tvwidget. Below are listed the OTUs in the tree in a crude table. The idea is that this table will contain a mapping between OTU labels and taxa.
It's Friday, so time for some random, half-baked ideas. Imagine that we have a database of evolutionary trees, and these overlap for a set of taxa that we are interested in. How do we summarise these trees? One approach is to make a supertree. It would be useful to display the subtrees that went into making this supertree, if only to give an idea of how much they agree with the supertree.
