A challenge in working with large taxonomic classifications is how you display them to the user, especially if the user probably doesn't want all the gory details.

Revisiting an old idea (Clustering taxonomic names) I've added code to cluster strings into sets of similar strings to the phyloinformatics course site.This service (available at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/phyloinformatics/services/clusterstrings.php) takes a list of strings, one per line, and returns a list of clusters.

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.

Webdot isn't available for Mac OS X, and as I use an iBook running Panther for all my development work (before moving to a Linux box to host the results) I wanted to have the same functionality on my iBook. This can be achieved by hacking a simplified version of webdot. This Perl script creates a virtual web browser to serve the image.