How to cite: Page, R. (2023). A taxonomic search engine. https://doi.org/10.59350/r3g44-d5s15 Tony Rees commented on my recent post Ten years and a million links. I’ve responded to some of his comments, but I think the bigger question deserves more space, hence this blog post. Tony’s comment {#tony’s-comment} My response I think there are several ways to approach this.

As trailed on a Twitter thread last week I’ve been working on a manuscript describing the efforts to map taxonomic names to their original descriptions in the taxonomic literature. The preprint is on bioRxiv doi:10.1101/2023.05.29.542697 Much of the work has been linking taxa to names, which still has huge gaps.

Some quick notes on interface ideas for digital libraries and/or knowledge graphs. Recently there’s been something of an explosion in bibliographic tools to explore the literature.

One thing about ChatGPT is it has opened my eyes to some concepts I was dimly aware of but am only now beginning to fully appreciate. ChatGPT enables you ask it questions, but the answers depend on what ChatGPT “knows”. As several people have noted, what would be even better is to be able to run ChatGPT on your own content. Indeed, ChatGPT itself now supports this using plugins.

I haven’t blogged for a while, work and other reasons have meant I’ve not had much time to think, and mostly I blog to help me think. ChatGPT is obviously a big thing at the moment, and once we get past the moral panic (“students can pass exams using AI!”) there are a lot of interesting possibilities to explore.

My dad died last weekend. Below is a notice in today's New Zealand Herald. I'm in New Zealand for his funeral. Don't really have the words for this right now.

I heard yesterday from Martin Kalfatovic (BHL) that David Remsen has died. Very sad news.

This is just some random notes on an “ideal” taxonomic journal, inspired in part by some recent discussions on “turbo-taxonomy” (e.g., https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1087.76720 and https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-10-15), and also examples such as the Australian Journal of Taxonomy https://doi.org/10.54102/ajt.qxi3r which seems well-intentioned but limited.

I tweeted about this but want to bookmark it for later as well. The paper “A molecular-based identification resource for the arthropods of Finland” doi:10.1111/1755-0998.13510 contains the following: I think this is a very clever way to characterise the project. In an age of machine learning this may be commonest way to share knowledge , namely as expert-labelled training data used to build tools for others.

I've been thinking a bit about how one could use a Markdown wiki-like tool such as Obsidian to work with taxonomic data (see earlier posts Obsidian, markdown, and taxonomic trees and Personal knowledge graphs: Obsidian, Roam, Wikidata, and Xanadu). One "gotcha" would be how to name pages.