A decade ago (OMG, that can't be right, an actual decade ago) I created "iSpecies", a simple little tool to mashup a variety of data from GBIF, NCBI, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Google Scholar to create a search engine for species.

Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick. As an example, here is a quantum treemap for Laurasiatheria.

Last month EOL took the brave step of including Wikipedia content in its pages. I say "brave" because early on EOL was pretty reluctant to embrace Wikipedia on this scale (see the report of the Informatics Advisory Group that I chaired back in 2008), and also because not all of EOL's curators have been thrilled with this development.

What follows are some random thoughts as I try and sort out what things I want to focus on in the coming days/weeks. If you don't want to see some wallowing and general procrastination, look away now. I see four main strands in what I've been up to in the last year or so: services mashups wikis phyloinformatics Let's take these in turns. Services Not glamourous, but necessary.

Tweets from @ attilacsordas and @stew alerted me to the Google Map of the H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak by niman. Ryan Schenk commented: "It'd be a million times more useful if that map was hooked into a timeline so you could see the spread.", which inspired me to knock together a timemap of swine flu. The timemap takes the RSS feed from niman's map and generates a timemap using Nick Rabinowitz's Timemap library.

Chris Freeland's tweet alterted me to the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest: Elsevier are clearly looking for ideas (they also have their Grand Challenge), and there's been some interesting commentary on the Article 2.0 contest.

Wired 16.01 has an article entitled The Data Wars by Josh McHugh. A quote from the printed version: It's a sobering read for those of us who advocate harvesting data from as many sources as possible, more so in light of Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo. Yahoo provides free access to many of its tools via an API (such as the image search I use in iSpecies, and in this sense is much more open than Google. Might this change under Microsoft...?