The GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is open! From the official announcementFirst prize is €20,000, full details on prizes and entry requirements are on the Challenge web site.

Many thanks to everyone who played pin-the-skull-on-the-carnivore. The answers are down at the bottom of this post, so if you’ve just arrived here and want to take the challenge, go here before you scroll down. To fill up some space, let me point out how crazy variable the skulls of black bears, Ursus americanus , are. Here’s the one I helped dig up, missing the occipital region.

In this image I have assembled photos of skulls (or casts of skulls) of six extant carnivores. I exclusively used photos from the Skulls Unlimited website because they had all the taxa I wanted, lit about the same and photographed from similar angles. The omission of scale indicators is deliberate. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to match these skulls with the animals they came from.

BMC Ecology has published Alex Hardisty and Dave Roberts' white paper on biodiversity informatics: Here are their 12 recommendations (with some comments of my own): Open Data, should be normal practice and should embody the principles of being accessible, assessable, intelligible and usable. Seems obvious, but data providers are often reluctant to open "their" data up for reuse. Data encoding should allow analysis across multiple

In the spirit of the Would you give me a grant experiment? [1] here's the draft of a proposal I'm working on for the Computable Data Challenge. It's an attempt to merge taxonomic names, the primary literature, and phylogenetics into one all-singing, all-dancing website that makes it easy to browse names, see the publications relevant to those names, and see what, if anything, we know about the phylogeny of those taxa.

Now we are awash in challenges! EOL has announced its Computable Data Challenge:Some $US 50,000 is on offer. "Challenge" is perhaps a misnomer, as EOL is offering this money not as a prize at the end, but rather to fund one or more proposals (submitted by 22 May) that are accepted.

The Encyclopedia of Life have announced the EOL Phylogenetic Tree Challenge. The contest has two purposes:First prize is a trip to iEvoBio 2012, this year in Ottawa, Canada. For more details visit the challenge website. There is also an EOL community devoted to this challenge.Challenges are great things, especially ones with worthwhile tasks and decent prizes.

Quick final comment on the TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for?. As I noted in the previous post, Olivier Rovellotti (@orovellotti) and Javier de la Torre (@jatorre) have produced some nice visualisations of the frog data set:Nice as these are, I can't help feeling that they actually help make my point about the current state of RDF in biodiversity informatics.

This is a follow up to my previous post TDWG Challenge - what is RDF good for? where I'm being, frankly, a pain in the arse, and asking why we bother with RDF? In many ways I'm not particularly anti-RDF, but it bothers me that there's a big disconnect between the reasons we are going down this route and how we are actually using RDF.

Since I won't be able to be at the Biodiversity Heritage Library's Life and Literature meeting I thought I'd share some ideas for their Life and Literature Code Challenge. The deadline is pretty close (October 17) so having ideas now isn't terribly helpful I admit. That aside, here are some thoughts inspired by the challenge.