This post is likely to seem somewhat off the wall, given the rush to getting everything in the cloud, but it's Friday, so let's give it a whirl. One idea I've been toying with is dispensing with relational databases, wikis, etc. and just storing taxonomic data using files and folders on a disk.
Busy day yesterday, giving two talks, one at The Natural History Museum, one at the British Library. Slides for the NHM talk are below.
In the wiki examples I've been developing I've been trying to model names using the TDWG LSID vocabularies, particularly TaxonName. Roger Hyam has obviously put a huge amount of work into developing these, and they handle just about everything I need. However, I think that there's one thing missing, namely a way to express the logical relationship between the parts of a multinomial taxonomic name.
Reading a recent TAXACOM thread (Species Pages - purpose) my sense is that some people are arguing that "species pages" would be time consuming to create, aren't much good for taxonomists (to quote Mike Dallwitz "In brief, to make simplified and attractive information about taxa easily available to casual users?"), and nobody gets credit for making them.
Modelling taxa is a bit trickier. I've sketched my ideas for distinguishing name strings and taxonomic names earlier. That's the easy stuff. What about "taxonomic concepts" and "OTUs"? As a first pass, I'm looking at linking taxon names to classifications via GUIDs.
Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. Found this while Googling. Demo by Perceptive Pixel of browsing the ITIS classification using their multi-touch technology. I want one...
ZooKeys (ISSN 1313-2970) is a new journal for the rapid publication of taxonomic names, rather like Zootaxa . On first glance it has some nice features, such as being Open Access (using the Creative Commons Attribution license), DOIs, and RSS feeds -- although these don't validate, partly due to an error at the bottom of the feeds: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at
Nice paper by Robert Huber and Jens Klump has appeared in Computers & Geosciences entitled "Charting taxonomic knowledge through ontologies and ranking algorithms" (doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2008.02.016). The paper is not open access, but you can get some background from the post How TaxonRank works. Here's the abstract.
The dissection of the colossal squid ( Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni ) specimen from Antarctica has been getting a lot of coverage. Pangs of homesickness, especially seeing Steve O'Shea enthusing about the beast. Steve was a contemporary at Auckland Uni when I was a student.