One thing about ChatGPT is it has opened my eyes to some concepts I was dimly aware of but am only now beginning to fully appreciate. ChatGPT enables you ask it questions, but the answers depend on what ChatGPT “knows”. As several people have noted, what would be even better is to be able to run ChatGPT on your own content. Indeed, ChatGPT itself now supports this using plugins.

I haven’t blogged for a while, work and other reasons have meant I’ve not had much time to think, and mostly I blog to help me think. ChatGPT is obviously a big thing at the moment, and once we get past the moral panic (“students can pass exams using AI!”) there are a lot of interesting possibilities to explore.

My dad died last weekend. Below is a notice in today's New Zealand Herald. I'm in New Zealand for his funeral. Don't really have the words for this right now.

I heard yesterday from Martin Kalfatovic (BHL) that David Remsen has died. Very sad news.

This is just some random notes on an “ideal” taxonomic journal, inspired in part by some recent discussions on “turbo-taxonomy” (e.g., https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1087.76720 and https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-10-15), and also examples such as the Australian Journal of Taxonomy https://doi.org/10.54102/ajt.qxi3r which seems well-intentioned but limited.

I tweeted about this but want to bookmark it for later as well. The paper “A molecular-based identification resource for the arthropods of Finland” doi:10.1111/1755-0998.13510 contains the following: I think this is a very clever way to characterise the project. In an age of machine learning this may be commonest way to share knowledge , namely as expert-labelled training data used to build tools for others.

I've been thinking a bit about how one could use a Markdown wiki-like tool such as Obsidian to work with taxonomic data (see earlier posts Obsidian, markdown, and taxonomic trees and Personal knowledge graphs: Obsidian, Roam, Wikidata, and Xanadu). One "gotcha" would be how to name pages.

Taxonomic treatments have come up in various discussions I'm involved in, and I'm curious as to whether they are actually being used, in particular, whether they are actually being cited. Consider the following quote: "Traditional" academic citation is from article to article.

More arm-waving notes on taxonomic databases. I've started to add data to ChecklistBank and this has got me thinking about the issue of data quality.

Just some thoughts as I work through some datasets linking taxonomic names to the literature. In the diagram above I've tried to capture the different situatios I encounter. Much of the work I've done on this has focussed on case 1 in the diagram: I want to link a taxonomic name to an identifier for the work in which that name was published. In practise this means linking names to DOIs.