Over on Google Plus (yeah, me neither) Donat Agosti is giving me a hard time regarding the quality of some data that I am using. I've responded to Donat directly, but here I just want to quickly outline two different approaches to cleaning and reconciling bibliographic metadata.

Quick notes on "taxon concepts". In order to navigate through taxon names I plan to have at least one taxonomic classification in BioNames. GBIF makes the most sense at this stage. The model I'm adopting is that the classification is a graph where nodes have the id used by the external database (in this case GBIF). Each node has one or more names attached, and where possible the names are linked to the original description.

One of the fun things about developing web sites is learning new tricks, tools, and techniques. Typically I hack away on my MacBook, and when something seems vaguely usable I stick it on a web server.

One of the biggest pains (and self-inflicted wounds) in taxonomy is synonymy, the existence of multiple names for the same taxon. A common cause of synonymy is moving species to different genera in order to have their name reflect their classification.

Yet another taxonomic database, this time I can't blame anyone else because I'm the one building it (with some help, as I'll explain below). BioNames was my entry in EOL's Computable Data Challenge (you can see the proposal here: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92091). In that proposal I outlined my goal: The bulk of the funding from EOL is going into interface work by Ryan Schenk (@ryanschenk), author of synynyms among other cool