Yes, I’m afraid it’s yet another over the top response to yesterday’s big announcement of Google Wave, the latest paradigm shifting gob-smackingly brilliant piece of technology (or PR depending on your viewpoint) out of Google. My interest, however is pretty specific, how can we leverage it to help us capture, communicate, and publish research?

PLoS Computational Biolgy has recently published "Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article" (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361) by David Shotton and colleagues. As a proof of concept, they took Reis et al. (doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228) and "semantically enhanced" it:The enhanced article is here: doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001.

Reading a recent TAXACOM thread (Species Pages - purpose) my sense is that some people are arguing that "species pages" would be time consuming to create, aren't much good for taxonomists (to quote Mike Dallwitz "In brief, to make simplified and attractive information about taxa easily available to casual users?"), and nobody gets credit for making them.

Thinking more and more about using Mediawiki (or, more precisely, Semantic Mediawiki) as a platform for storing and querying information, rather than write my own tools completely from scratch. This means I need ways of modelling some relationships between identifiers and objects.The first is the relationship between document identifiers such as DOIs and metadata about the document itself.

Freebase Parallax is a very cool interface to Freebase. Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but on of the great things about putting stuff online is that it may be useful to other people. What seems like ages ago I developed the Glasgow Taxonomic Name Server to experiment with searching for and display taxonomic names and classifications. As part of that work I developed a SOAP web service, and wrote a tutorial on how to use SOAP from within Microsoft Excel.

Well, the LSID discussion has just exploded in the last few weeks.