Using Mistral for Data tagging Author · Xuzeng He ( ORCID: 0009–0005–7317–7426) Introduction Data tagging, in simple terms, is the process of assigning labels or tags to your data so that they are easier to retrieve or analyse.

The Encylopedia of Life (EOL) has been relaunched, with a new look and much social media funkiness. I've been something of an EOL sceptic, but looking at the new site I think I can see what EOL is for. Ironically, it's not really about E. O. Wilson's original vision (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(02)00040-X: We still lack a decent database that does this.

Given that the clones are hot on my heels, I feel the need to add more bells and whistles to iSpecies. The first new feature is automated tagging, and uses Yahoo's Term Extraction API.

One of my pet peeves is how backward natural history museums are in grasping the possibilities the Internet raises. Most electronic displays in museums have low information content, and are doomed to obsolescence. Traditional media (plaques, labels) have limited space, and also date quickly.

Following on from (but unrelated to) my post last week about feed tools we have two posts, one from Deepak Singh, and one from Neil Saunders, both talking about ‘friend feeds’ or ‘lifestreams’. The idea here is of aggregating all the content you are generating (or is being generated about you?) into one place. There are a couple of these about but the main ones seem to be Friendfeed and Profiliac.

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing.

I got to meet Jeremiah Faith this morning and we had an excellent wide ranging discussion which I will try to capture in more detail later. However I wanted to get down some thoughts we had at the end of the discussion. We were talking about how to publicise and generate more interest and activity for Open Notebook Science. Jeremiah suggested the idea of a Sourceforge for science;

I am in the process of preparing the talk I am giving at Drexel next month and have been going over the early versions of our Lab Blog and getting a clearer picture of how our usage has evolved. I wanted to record this so will write some notes as I go. To re-iterate our key aims were to capture and record the data and to make it available in a way that would allow machine processing.