Thinking about the GUID mess in biodiversity informatics, stumbling across some documents about the PILIN (Persistent Identifier Linking INfrastructure) project, and still smarting from problems getting hold of specimen data, I thought I'd try and articulate one solution. Firstly, I think biodiversity informatics has made the same mistake as digital librarians in thinking that people care where the get information from.

Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below.

The rather frail nature of biodiversity services (some of the major players have had service breaks in the last few weeks) has prompted me to revisit Dave Vieglais's BigDig and extend it to other services, such as uBio, EOL, and TreeBASE, as well as DSpace repositories and tools such as Connotea. The result is at http://bioguid.info/status/. The idea is to poll each service once an hour to see if it is online.

The proceedings of the BNCOD 2008 Workshop on "Biodiversity Informatics: challenges in modelling and managing biodiversity knowledge" are online. This workshop was held in conjunction with the 25th British National Conference on Databases (BNCOD 2008) at Cardiff, Wales. The papers make interesting reading.