Revisiting an old idea (Clustering taxonomic names) I've added code to cluster strings into sets of similar strings to the phyloinformatics course site. This service (available at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/phyloinformatics/services/clusterstrings.php) takes a list of strings, one per line, and returns a list of clusters. For example, given the names Ferrusac 1821 Bonavita 1965 Ferussa 1821 Fer.

Thinking about next steps for my BioStor project, one thing I keep coming back to is the problem of how to dramatically scale up the task of finding taxonomic literature online. While I personal find it oddly therapeutic to spend a little time copying and pasting citations into BioStor's OpenURL resolver and trying to find these references in BHL, we need something a little more powerful.

As part of my Quixotic attempt to construct a wiki of taxonomic names, I'm building a database of names and links. My current plan is to seed this with the NCBI taxonomy. What I want to do is flesh out the NCBI taxonomy with authorities and links to the original literature. At the moment the NCBI taxonomy is almost "nude", lacking links to the literature behind the names.