I've written a short paper entitled "Liberating links between datasets using lightweight data publishing: an example using plant names and the taxonomic literature" (phew) and put a preprint on bioRxiv (https://doi.org/10.1101/343996) while I figure out where to publish it. Here's the abstract: In some ways the paper is simply a record of me trying to figure out how to publish a project that I've been working on for several years, namely

TL;DR; The Plant List is now in GBIF http://doi.org/10.15468/btkum2. Readers of this blog may recall that I've had a somewhat jaundiced view of The Plant List.

Following on from Testing the GBIF taxonomy with the graph database Neo4J I've added a more complex test that relies on linking taxa to names. In this case I've picked some legume genera ( Coursetia and Poissonia ) where there have been frequent changes of name.

Quick notes on taxonomic names (again). It's a continuing source of bafflement that the biodiversity community is making a dog's breakfast of names. It seems we are forever making it more complicated than it needs to be, forever minting new acronyms that pollute the landscape without actually contributing anything useful, and forever promising shiny new tools and services without every actually delivering them.

To much fanfare (e.g., Nature News , "Linnaeus meets the Internet" doi:10.1038/news.2010.221), on May 5th PLoS ONE published Sandy Knapp's "Four New Vining Species of Solanum (Dulcamaroid Clade) from Montane Habitats in Tropical America" doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010502.

One thing I find myself doing a lot is creating Excel spreadsheets and filling them will lists of taxonomic names and bibliographic references, for which I then try to extract identifiers (such as DOIs). This is a tedious business, but the hope is that by doing it once I can create a useful resource. However, often I get bored and the spreadsheets lie forgotten in some deep recess of my computer's hard drive.

Continuing with RSS feeds, I've now added wrappers around IPNI that will return for each plant family a list of names added to the IPNI database in the last 30 days. You can see the list at here. One thing which is a constant source of frustration for me is the disconnect between nomenclators (lists of published names for species) and scientific publishing.