Chris Freeland has written a thoughtful summary of his experiences of the two-day closed session to create a road map for biodiversity informatics, entitled #ebio09, silverbacks, & haiku.

So, e-Biosphere '09 is over (at least for the plebs like me, the grown ups get to spend two days charting the future of biodiversity informatics). It was an interesting event, on several levels. It's late, and I'm shattered, so this post ill cover only a few things. This was first conference I'd attended where some of the participants twittered during proceedings.

I've put the slides for my e-Biosphere 09 challenge entry on SlideShare. e-Biosphere '09 Challenge View more OpenOffice presentations from rdmpage. Not much information on the other entries yet, except for the eBiosphere Citizen Science Challenge, by Joel Sachs and colleagues, which will demonstrate a "global human sensor net". Their plan is to aggregate observations posted on Flickr, Twitter, Spotter, and email.

e-Biosphere '09 kicks off next week, and features the challenge: Originally I planned to enter the wiki project I've been working on for a while, but time was running out and the deadline was too ambitious. Hence, I switched to thinking about RSS feeds. The idea was to first create a set of RSS feeds for sources that lack them, which I've been doing over at http://bioguid.info/rss, then integrate these feeds in a useful way.

Although I'd been thinking of getting the wiki project ready for e-Biosphere '09 as a challenge entry, lately I've been playing with RSS has a complementary, but quicker way to achieve some simple integration. I've been playing with RSS on and off for a while, but what reignited my interest was the swine flu timemap I made last week. The neatest thing about the timemap was how easy it was to make.

The e-Biosphere online forum has a topic entitled Why open source code?

The e-Biosphere meeting in London June 1-3 has announced a The e-Biosphere 09 Informatics Challenge: The "real time" aspect of the challenge seems a bit forced.