There is a fairly scathing editorial in Nature [The new zoo. (2013). Nature, 503(7476), 311–312. doi:10.1038/503311b ] that reacts to a recent paper by Dubois et al.: To quote the editorial: Ouch! But Dubois et al.'s paper pretty much deserves this reaction - it's a reactionary rant that is breathtaking in it's lack of perspective.

We are building a taxonomic toolbelt for R called taxize - which gives you programmatic access to many sources of taxonomic data on the web. We just pushed a new version to CRAN (v0.1.5) with a lot of changes (see here for a rundown). Here are a few highlights of the changes.

One feature I've always wanted to have in BioNames is a timeline of taxonomic names. ION has one (see here), but I wanted a way to go from the timeline to the actual publications. In other words, if, say, there were approximately 99 bird names published in 2012, I want to see the papers that published those names.

Readers of this blog will know that I'm sceptical about the current value of linked data and RDF in biodiversity informatics. But I came across an interesting paper on RDF and biocuration that suggests a good "use case" for RDF in constructing and curating taxonomic databases. The paper is "Catching inconsistencies with the semantic web: a biocuration case study" (PDF here) by Jerven Bolleman and Sebastien Gehant.

Donald Hobern drew my attention to nice the way iNaturalist displays taxonomic splits: In this example, observations identified as Rhipidura fuliginosa are being split into Rhipidura fuliginosa and Rhipidura albiscapa . This immediately reminds me of the idea which keeps circulating around, namely using version control tools to manage taxonomic 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

As part of the discussion on whether legacy biodiversity literature matters a graph from the following paper came up: So, why is the Sarkar et al. graph bogus? Here is their graph (Fig. 3) for animals: This is the number of new animal species described each year, estimated by parsing taxonomic names and extracting the date in the taxonomic authority. There are two prominent "spikes" which are worrying.

Benoît Fontaine et al. recently published a study concluding that average lag time between a species being discovered and subsequently described is 21 years. The paper concludes: This is a conclusion that merits more investigation, especially as the title of the paper suggests there is an appalling lack of efficiency (or resources) in the way we decsribe biodiversity.

Prompted by a conversation with Vince Smith at the recent Online Taxonomy meeting at the Linnean Society in London I've been revisiting touch-based displays of large trees. There are a couple of really impressive examples of what can be done. Perceptive Pixel I've blogged about this before, but came across another video that better captures the excitement of touch-based navigation of a taxonomy.

Playing with some sequence data I found numerous Plasmodium sequences from the following paper: These sequences (e.g., U43145) give the host as Thamnomys rutilans . You'd think it would be fairly easy to learn more about this animal, given that it hosts a relative of the cause of malaria in humans, and indeed there are a number of biomedical papers that come up in Google, e.g.: Google also tells me that Thamnomys