I've just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to find a reference in BioStor. The reference in question isand comes from the Reptile Database page for the gecko Phyllodactylus gilberti HELLER, 1903. This is primary database for reptile taxonomy, and supplies the Catalogue of Life, which repeats this reference verbatim.Thing is, this reference doesn't exist! Page 39 of Proc. Biol. Soc.

I've added a feature to my Biodiversity Heritage Library viewer that should help make sense of the names found on a page. Until now I've displayed them as a list of "tags", which ignores the relations among the names.

The problem of displaying large taxonomic classifications on a web page continues to be an on again-off again obsession. My latest experiment makes use of Nicolas Garcia Belmonte's wonderful JavaScript Infovis Toolkit (JIT), which provides implementations of classic visualisations such as treemaps, hyperbolic trees, and SpaceTrees. SpaceTrees were developed at Maryland's HCIL lab, and that lab has applied them to biodiversity informatics.

I've started to come across more taxonomic books in Google Books, such as Catalogue of the specimens of snakes in the collection of the British museum by John Edward Gray. Google books provides a nice widget for embedding views of books. There is tool for generating the Javascript code.

Next few weeks will be busy with term starting, kids visiting, and other commitments, so time to jot down some ideas. The first is to have a Wiki for taxonomic names. Bit like Wikispecies, but actually useful, by which I mean useful for working biologists. This would mean links to digital literature (DOIs, Handles, etc.), use of identifiers for names and taxa (such as NCBI taxids, LSIDs, etc.), and having it pre-populated with data.

The proceedings of the BNCOD 2008 Workshop on "Biodiversity Informatics: challenges in modelling and managing biodiversity knowledge" are online. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 25th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD 2008) at Cardiff, Wales.

Mauro Cavalcanti brought Chris Anderson's The End of Theory article in Wired to my attention, part of the July issue on "The End of Science".Of course, the end of science is hyperbole of the highest order (as, indeed, is the "end of theory"). It is also ironic that in the same issue Wired confess to having gotten 5 predictions of the death of something hopelessly wrong (including web browsers and online music swapping, no less). However, I

I have an "on again/off again" relationship with treemaps. Lately, I've been taking another look, partly inspired by Björn Engdahl's MSc thesis Ordered and Unordered Treemap Algorithms and Their Applications on Handheld Devices.

A bit more browsing of the Catalogue of Life annual checklist for 2007 reveals a rather annoying feature that, I think, cripples the Catalogue's utility. With each release the checklist grows in size. From their web site:However, with each release the identifiers for each taxon change.