PLoS recently announced a dedicated iPad app, that covers all the PLoS Journals, and which is available from the App Store. Given the statement that "PLoS is committed to continue pushing the boundaries of scientific communication" I was expecting something special.

Time for a Friday folly. I've made a clunky screencast showing an example of linking biodiversity data together, using bioGUID as the universal wrapper around various data sources. I started with GenBank sequence EF013683, added another, EF013555, then explored some links (specimen, publication, taxon, journal), using the OpenLink RDF Browser: Linking biodiversity data from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

After some fussing and hair pulling I've constructed a demo of linking a journal to the Biodiversity Heritage Library and displaying the results in Zotero (see my earlier post for rationale). After some searching I managed to retrieve metadata for several hundred article from the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature . Using a local copy of the BHL metadata, I wrote a script that looked up each article in BHL and found the URL of the

One thing I find myself doing (probably more often than I should) is adding a reference to my Zotero library for an item in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). BHL doesn't have article-level metadata (see But where are the articles?), so when I discover a page of interest (e.g., one that contains the original description of a taxon) I store metadata for the article containing that page in my Zotero library.

One thing about the Encyclopedia of Life which bugs me no end is the awful way it displays the bibliography generated from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The image on the right shows the bibliography for the frog Hyla rivularis Taylor, 1952. It's one long, alphabetical list of pages. How can a user make sense of this?

What follows are some random thoughts as I try and sort out what things I want to focus on in the coming days/weeks. If you don't want to see some wallowing and general procrastination, look away now. I see four main strands in what I've been up to in the last year or so: services mashups wikis phyloinformatics Let's take these in turns. Services Not glamourous, but necessary.

For fun I quickly programmed a little tool for bioGUID that makes use of Connotea's web api. When an article is displayed, the page loads a Javascript script that makes a call to a simple web service that looks up a reference in Connotea and displays a tag cloud if the reference is found.

Finally submitted (two days late) a manuscript for the BMC Bioinformatics Special Issue on Biodiversity Informatics organised by Neil Sarkar and sponsored by EOL and CBOL. The manuscript, entitled "bioGUID: resolving, discovering, and minting identifiers for biodiversity informatics" describes my bioGUID project. If you are interested made pre-print available at Nature Precedings (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3079.1).

One problem I've encountered in building a bibliographic database is the different ways author names are written. For example, for papers I've authored my name may be written as "Roderic D. M. Page" or "R. D. M. Page". Googling about this problem I came across Dror Feitelson's paper On identifying name equivalences in digital libraries.

One of the judges for the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest is Andrew Perry, whose blog has some posts on Noel O'Boyle's OpenRef idea (see DOI or DOH? Proposal for a RESTful unique identifier for papers). Andrew discusses some implementations he has come up with, and compares OpenRef with OpenURL. This prompted me to add OpenRef-style identifiers to bioGUID's OpenURL resolver.