Yet another taxonomic database, this time I can't blame anyone else because I'm the one building it (with some help, as I'll explain below).BioNames was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge (you can see the proposal here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92091). In that proposal I outlined my goal:The bulk of the funding from EOL is going into interface work by Ryan Schenk (@ryanschenk), author of synynyms among other cool things.

In any discussion of data gathering or data cleaning the term "crowdsourcing" inevitably comes up. A example where this approach has been successful is the Encyclopedia of Life's Flickr pool, where Flickr users upload images that are harvested by EOL.Given that many Flickr photos are taken with cameras that have built-in GPS (such as the iPhone, the most common camera on Flickr) we could potentially use the Flickr photos not only as a source of

As part of a project to build a tool to navigate through taxonomic names and classifications I've become interested in quick ways to compare classifications.

One visualisation method I keep coming back too is the treemap.

There's a recent thread on the Encyclopedia of Life concerning erroneous images for the crab Leptograpsus . This is a crab I used to chase around rooks on stormy west-coast beaches near Auckland, so I was a little surprised to see the EOL page for Leptograpsus looks like this:The name and classification is the crab, but the image is of a fish ( Lethrinus variegatus ). Perhaps at some point in aggregating the images the two

In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

Now we are awash in challenges! EOL has announced its Computable Data Challenge:Some $US 50,000 is on offer. "Challenge" is perhaps a misnomer, as EOL is offering this money not as a prize at the end, but rather to fund one or more proposals (submitted by 22 May) that are accepted.

The Encyclopedia of Life have announced the EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. The contest has two purposes:First prize is a trip to iEvoBio 2012, this year in Ottawa, Canada. For more details visit the challenge website. There is also an EOL community devoted to this challenge.Challenges are great things, especially ones with worthwhile tasks and decent prizes.

As part of a course on "phyloinformatics" that I'm about to teach I've been making some visualisations of classifications. Here's one I've put together using jQuery Mobile and the Encyclopedia of Life API. It's pretty limited, but is a simple way to explore EOL using three different classifications.

Browsing EOL I stumbled upon the recently described fish Protoanguilla palau , shown below in an image by rairaiken2011:Two things struck me, the first is that the EOL page for this fish gives absolutely no clue as to where you would to find out more about this fish (apart from an unclickable link to the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoanguilla - seriously, a link that isn't clickable?), despite the fact this fish has been