With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to store an unlimited amount of information.
The following is a guest post by Bob Mesibov. According to w3techs, seven out of every eight websites in the Alexa top 10 million are UTF-8 encoded. This is good news for us screenscrapers, because it means that when we scrape data into a UTF-8 encoded document, the chances are good that all the characters will be correctly encoded and displayed. It's not quite good news for two reasons.
This guest post by Tony Rees describes his quest to track all genus names ever published (plus a subset of the species…). A “holy grail” for biodiversity informatics is a suitably quality controlled, human- and machine-queryable list of all the world’s species, preferably arranged in a suitable taxonomic hierarchy such as kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus or other.
Building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data. The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme is funding the PhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) project that aims to support data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated from metabolomics applications.
GigaScience recently published an article all about a Genotype Investigator for Genome-Wide Analyses, alternatively known as Gigwa. But what is this and how can it help? Guilhem Sempere explains more in a guest post. Exploring the structure of genomes and analyzing their evolution is essential to understanding the adaptation of organisms to biotic and abiotic environments.
The follow is a guest post by Bob Mesibov, who has contributed to iPhylo before. Like many iPhylo readers, I deal with large, pre-existing compilations of biodiversity data. The compilations come from museums, herbaria, aggregation projects and government agencies.
The current global panic about Zika is a “data gap” issue: a vacuum of information due to gaps in understanding of its spread and pathogenesis , and gaps in sharing the research data and specimens that will enable the global research community to keep one step ahead of the disease spread.
This guest post by Tony Rees explores some of the themes from his recent talk 10 years of Global Biodiversity Databases: Are We There Yet?. 10 years of global biodiversity databases: are we there yet?
Following on from his recent, and extensively discussed, offer to host SVPCA 2017, and a plan for the future, Richard Butler is now circulating his update, soliciting volunteers for the committee that virtually everyone agreed was a good idea. Dear SVPCA/SPPC friends and colleagues, We have identified you as a member of the SVPCA/SPPC community through having attended the meeting within the last five years.
We’re delighted to host this guest-blog on behalf of Richard Butler, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and guru of basal ornithischians. (Note that Matt and I don’t necessarily endorse or agree with everything Richard says; but we’re pleased to provide a forum for discussion.) Dear friends and colleagues within the SVPCA community; I am posting here courtesy of Mike and Matt with two objectives.