A little while ago I came across Wikisource, and it dawned on me that this is a model for BHL. To quote from the Wikisource web site: Much of their content comes from the Internet Archive (as does BHL's), and Wikisource have developed extensions for Mediaiwki to do some cool things, such as extract text and images from DjVu files.
At the start of this week I took part in a biodiversity informatics workshop at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseets, organised by Kevin Holston. It was a fun experience, and Kevin was a great host, going out of his way to make sure myself and other contributors were looked after. I gave my usual pitch along the lines of "if you're not online you don't exist", and talked about iSpecies, identifiers, and wikis.
On Wednesday morning I had the distinct pleasure of seeing a group of students in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto giving demos of tools and software that they have been developing over the past few months.
Yes, I know this is ultimately a case of the "genius of and", but the more I play with the Semantic Mediawiki extension the more I think this is going to be the most productive way forward. I've had numerous conversations with Vince Smith about this. Vince and colleagues at the NHM have been doing a lot of work on "Scratchpads" -- Drupal based webs sites that tend to be taxon-focussed.
One problem with my cunning plan to use Mediawiki REDIRECTs to handle DOIs is that some DOIs, such as those that BioOne serves based on SICIs contain square brackets, [ ], which conflicts with wiki syntax.
Thinking more and more about using Mediawiki (or, more precisely, Semantic Mediawiki) as a platform for storing and querying information, rather than write my own tools completely from scratch. This means I need ways of modelling some relationships between identifiers and objects. The first is the relationship between document identifiers such as DOIs and metadata about the document itself.
Following on from the previous post, I wrote a simpe Mediawiki extension to insert a Google Book into a wiki page. Written in a few minutes, not tested much, etc. To use this, copy the code below and save in a file googlebook.php in the extensions directory of your Mediawiki installation.