In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

Revisiting an old idea (Clustering taxonomic names) I've added code to cluster strings into sets of similar strings to the phyloinformatics course site. This service (available at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/phyloinformatics/services/clusterstrings.php) takes a list of strings, one per line, and returns a list of clusters. For example, given the names Ferrusac 1821 Bonavita 1965 Ferussa 1821 Fer.

Following on from the last post How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data? another interesting paper has appeared in TREE: The paper analyses the "ecology and social habits of taxonomists" and concludes: Queue flame war on TAXACOM, no doubt, but it's a refreshing conclusion, and it's based on actual data. Here I declare an interest.

Two papers estimating the total number of species have recently been published, one in the open access journal PLoS Biology : the second in Systematic Biology (which has an open access option but the authors didn't use it for this article): The first paper has gained a lot of attention, in part because Jonathan Eisen Bacteria &

Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’ Next month I'll be speaking in London at The Natural History Museum at a one day event Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond.

Each year the grandly titled International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) publishes list of the top 10 species described in the previous year.

Déjà vu is a scary thing. Four years ago I released a mapping between names in TreeBASE and other databases called TBMap (described here: doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-158). Today I find myself releasing yet another mapping, as part of my NCBI to Wikipedia project. By embedding the mapping in a wiki, it can be edited, so the kinds of problems I encountered with TbMap, recounted here, here, and here.

David ("Paddy") Patterson, Jerry Cooper, Paul Kirk, Rich Pyle, and David Remsen have published an article in TREE entitled "Names are key to the big new biology" (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.004). The abstract states: Do we need names? Reading this (full disclosure, I was a reviewer) I can't wondering whether the assumption that names are key really needs to be challenged.

Continuing the theme of taxonomic classification in Wikipedia, I'm perversely delighted that Wikipedia demonstrates Gregg's paradox so nicely. The late John R. Gregg wrote several papers and a book exploring the logical structure of taxonomy.

In the previous post I suggested that a productive way to meet EOL's goal of a web page per taxon would be to build upon Wikipedia, rather than go it alone.