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.

At the end of day two of the GBIF LSID-GUID Task Group I put together this crude diagram to summarise some of the possible links between biodiversity data and the larger linked data cloud, which I, among others, have argued is where biodiversity informatics should be heading.

Time for more half-baked ideas. There's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about EOL, Linked Data (sometimes abbreviated LOD), and Wikipedia. Pete DeVries (@pjd) is keen on LOD, and has been asking why TDWG isn't playing in this space. I've been muttering dark thoughts about EOL, and singing the praises of Wikipedia. On so it goes on. So, here's one vision of where we could (?should) be going with this.

PLoS Computational Biolgy has recently published "Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article" (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361) by David Shotton and colleagues. As a proof of concept, they took Reis et al. (doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228) and "semantically enhanced" it: The enhanced article is here: doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001.

The LSID discussion has flared up (again) on the TDWG mailing lists. This discussion keeps coming around (I've touched on it here and here), this time it was sparked by the LSID SourceForge site being broken (the part where you get the code is OK). Some of the issues being raised include: Nobody uses LSIDs except the biodiversity informatics crowd, have we missed something?

When it comes to getting data up on the web, I am actually a great optimist. I think things are moving in the right direction and with high profile people like Tim Berners-Lee making the case, the with meme of “Linked Data” spreading, and a steadily improving set of tools and interfaces that make all the complexities of RDF, OWL, OAI-ORE, and other standards disappear for the average user, there is a real sense that this might come together.

While biodiversity informatics putters along, generating loads of globally unique identifiers that nobody else uses, perhaps it's time to take a look at the bigger picture. DBPedia is an effort to extract data from Wikipedia and make it available as linked data. At the heart of this effort is the use of HTTP URIs to identify resources, and reusing those URIs. Hence, for many concepts DBpedia URIs are the default option.