Roderic Page › Comments

Please add Google Scholar to the API. That in itself would be great. But I think fantastic tools can be made if the search result also includes the information currently presented on Google Scholar. In particular 1) The number of citations (and links to them) 2) BibTex reference entry 3) Information whether the paper/content is available as HTML. (And even better if it is under a Free license.) - Roderic Page

The BibApp is a Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder - Roderic Page

I'm not aware of such a service, but it would be worthwhile thinking about what would be needed to make it happen (as well as exactly what kind of information you'd want). There are RSS feeds for new names (e.g., uBio new names http://www.ubio.org/rss... and ION http://www.organismnames.com/), and I've experimented with creating such services for IPNI and Index Fungorum, see http://bioguid.info/rss/. If you wanted taxonomic changes (e.g., new synonomies), then this requires a service that provides a classification (e.g., Catalogue of Life), and for that service to maintain a change history (e.g., for it to record events such as moving a species form one genus to another). I guess you'd also want the ability to select specific groups you are interested in. All of this is, in principle, doable, but I've not see anybody tackle it. - Roderic Page

First things first. Here you can download my version of Janrain's PHP OpenId library, fixed for PHP 5.3. Now, I will explain what I did to make it work. - Roderic Page

In general, a Bézier curve is a polynomial expression used to describe a curve. They are commonly used in computer graphics software, but they may not always be called anything more than a curve. Generally, the user selects two endpoints and one or two control points. A Bézier curve with one control point is called a quadratic Bézier curve and the kind with two control points is called cubic. - Roderic Page

Open Energy Info is a platform to connect the world’s energy data. It is a linked open data platform bringing together energy information to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data. OpenEI follows guidelines set by the White House’s Open Government Initiative , which is focused on transparency, collaboration, and participation. OpenEI strives to provide open access to this energy information, which will spur creativity and drive innovation in the energy sector. - Roderic Page

See http://biostor.org/referen... - Roderic Page

This service allows you to create an HTTP URI for any named biological taxon. It works very simply. You follow a simple set of rules to create an HTTP URI (also known as a URL) based on the name of the organism. You use the resulting URI to mark up your data - particularly if you are using RDF. Anyone else who follows the same process will create the same URI for their data. Machines will know that the two sets of data are about the same taxon because they use the same URI. There is no more confusion around the correct way to cite a name. If any person or machine calls the URI (puts it in a web browser for example) the website will respond by saying the equivalent of "This URI represents a taxon with the name ... " and it will use the simple rules backwards to work out what the name of the organism is. - Roderic Page

This is probably where I'm heading, but everything requires effort, so I'm curious as to whether people feel logging in is necessary or, indeed, whether CAPTCHAs are too much of a pain. - Roderic Page

If a web site author wants to enable users to enter information, there are at least three choices: Enable anonymous editing with no restrictions Users can be anonymous but must pass a CAPTCHA (a distorted image of a word) Require users to log in before they can edit What do people think of these choices? The specific reason I'm asking is that I've released http://biostor.org, which enables users to find articles in BHL (http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org), and to edit bibliographic metadata for those articles. I've chosen to use a CAPTCHA (specifically, http://recaptcha.net), rather than require users to login (for example, see http://biostor.org/referen...). This means that anybody can make edits, providing they pass the CAPTCHA. One downside that I see is that edits are effectively anonymous, meaning the kind of cough competition for badges and reputation that is possible on this StackExchange site won't happen. Would the lack of being able to claim edits be a hindrance to... - Roderic Page

The journal platform team here at NPG just rolled out machine readable metadata for the papers we publish in Dublin Core, PRISM (good PRISM, not to be confused with evil PRISM) and Google metadata formats. - Roderic Page

If the documentation gets ported to the Drupal web site, the following information might be useful to add, or, added to Integrated Metatag as default settings. This is the email I received from the Google Scholar team: - Roderic Page

Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction. - Roderic Page

Donald, I think you've highlighted a major issue -- most biodiversity informatics services aren't actually useful for the most basic tasks ("what is this thing I'm looking at"?). It would be useful to try wrapping the Google search engine (although not all parts of it have an API - AFAIK the image search doesn't) and create a simple service that takes a few key terms and the image. I wonder whether adding geography (either user-supplied, or GPS if embedded in image) could be used to refine the set of possible hits (e.g., use GBIF web services to create list of known taxa from that area, such as "lizards"). One could make use of the Flickr EOL group as well, by indexing the images based on geography and tags and presenting the user with images others have tagged (and possibly indentified). Could be a simple and useful service (and if put on mobile devices such as the iPhone it could be a "killer app" for this field). - Roderic Page

Regarding community development I have a lot of sympathy with David Shorthouse's "The community is dead" post http://ispiders.blogspot.com/2009.... I think sites like StackExchange work (and communities form around them) because they make individuals recognisable, and give them credit for contributions (and the content is very useful). It will be interesting to see how the site evolves, and what kinds of questions are asked (a lot are fairly meta at the moment, StackOverflow ended up having it's own "meta" site http://meta.stackoverflow.com/) - Roderic Page

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) is making a lot of buzz in the tech industry, and rightfully so. With EC2, you can ramp up to a massive server farm in a matter of minutes, while scaling back down to a single server when things calm down. The benefits are obvious, as you only pay for what you need and you have access to more computing power right when you need it. - Roderic Page

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) is making a lot of buzz in the tech industry, and rightfully so. With EC2, you can ramp up to a massive server farm in a matter of minutes, while scaling back down to a single server when things calm down. The benefits are obvious, as you only pay for what you need and you have access to more computing power right when you need it. - Roderic Page

I guess this raises the question of who pays for the cloud storage, and why is this more sustainable than individual providers hosting the data? Obviously, many providers have a poor track record of maintaining access to their data (a fact I've moaned about a lot in the last couple of years), but there is no such thing as a free lunch. - Roderic Page

What do people see as the role of cloud computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...) in biodiversity informatics? Are there compelling cases where this technology makes a difference (I'm thinking of map-reduce, Amazon storage and computing facilities, etc.)? If one wanted to get involved in this area where would one start? What amount of data would one need for this approach to be worthwhile? What kinds of problems are not suited to this technology? - Roderic Page

Bugger, by voting your question up I've given you a seemingly unassailable lead in the reputation race ;) - Roderic Page

The American Journal of Science started in 1818 and is the oldest scientific journal published continuously in the United States. AJS quickly became, and remains, an important source for seminal American scientific papers and received top ranking in 2003 for peer reviewed journals in the field of earth sciences that publish new content. Started as a general review of advances in the arts and sciences, AJS now deals strictly with geology and other earth sciences. - Roderic Page

I’m going to cover three basic techniques for incorporating some simple data visualization into standards-based navigation patterns. All of them start with the building block of HTML navigation: an unordered list of links. We’re going to tweak the markup a bit and add in some data points and a few hooks for styling, but in each case, the basic pattern is the same familiar one. Since we don’t have the pure data semantics of a table to rely on, we’ll use semantic class names in the tradition of microformats to preserve as much of the data’s structure in our markup as possible. And since we’re using HTML and CSS, we can use em-based measurements throughout to make sure the charts adapt as the user scales the text size. - Roderic Page

I gather GeoLocate has increased it's scope to the whole globe http://www.museum.tulane.edu/geoworl.... I agree this would be a great use of BHL. Do I understand you correctly that you're thinking of extracting locality strings that include lats and longs, and building a database that can be used to geolocate text strings from other sources, or are you thinking of geocoding BHL content using external services? - Roderic Page

Ripple is a dedicated scripting language for the Semantic Web. Ripple programs not only query the Semantic Web, but also reside within it as RDF data structures, forming a global network of interlinked programs. Ripple is best classified as a relational stack language, closely related to functional stack languages such as Joy, Factor and Cat. As a Semantic Web interface, Ripple is a fast, text-based linked data crawler and browser with all of the flexibility of a Turing-complete programming language. - Roderic Page

The main function of a good user interface is to provide users with an intuitive mapping between user’s intention and application’s function that manages to provide a solution to the given task. Basically, user interface describes the way people interact with a site and the way users can access its functions. In fact, usability is a biproduct of a good user interface and it determines how easily a user can perform all of the functions provided by the site. Usability is a crucial part of every design, especially on websites with a large amount of functions and users. - Roderic Page

It seems that quite many people want to get their lightbox resizing automatically, but there were not many good solutions out there. I finally found a solution from Sebastien Grosjean, which was already integrated into a later, not yet very object oriented lightbox version, by Michael R. Bagnall. However the latest available one, which was upgraded to use latest Prototype and Scriptaculous versions, was not patched. - Roderic Page

The Wikipedia article Javier refers to is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Roderic Page

There is no standard date/time format that meets the needs of various well-known XML metadata schemas, for example MODS, METS, PREMIS, etc. For several years there have been various discussions about developing a reasonably comprehensive date/time definition for the bibliographic community, and submitting it either for standardization or some other mode of formalization - a W3C note for example, a NISO Profile, and/or an amendment to ISO 8601. This website describes the current effort to define an extended date/time definition. - Roderic Page

Filtered Push is described in http://dx.doi.org/10... - Roderic Page

Lots of nice examples, but I think there's a difference between people adding photos to Flickr that can be harvested (or adding observations to iNaturalist), and people actually annotating records. Herbarium sheets comes closest to what I have in mind, that is, people spending time on a task for community benefit. I don't think uploading photos to Flickr counts (people would do this anyway, which I suspect is why it's been so successful). I'd be curious as to what degree of community involvement you get in PPE. - Roderic Page

Joseph has more examples on his blog http://evo-karma.blogspot.com/2009... - Roderic Page