A nice article by Brendan Borrell about the secret life of herpetologist Edward Taylor, and Rafe Brown's efforts to untangle his taxonomic legacy has appeared in Nature :Fascinating article, but as always I'm going to skip straight past the content and look at links. The article leads with Ptychozoon intermedium , the Philippine parachute gecko.

The journal Mycokeys has published the following paper:This paper contains a diagram that seems innocuous enough but which I find worrying:The nodes in the graph are "biodiversity megascience platforms", the edges are "cross-linkages and data exchange". What bothers me is that if you view biodiversity informatics through this lens then the relationships among these projects becomes the focus.

Sometimes I need to remind myself just why I'm spending so much time trying to make sense of other people's data, and why I go on (and on) about identifiers. One reason for my obsession is I want data to be "sticky", like the burrs shown in the photo above (Who invented velcro? by A-dep). Shared identifiers are like the hooks on the burrs, if two pieces of data have the same identifier they will stick together.