BioCorder - Biodiversity Recorder

Biocorder Beta 0.2.3 Released

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:28:03 -0400

Hot on the heals of 0.2.2:

Biocorder Beta 0.2.2 Released

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:27:56 -0400

Skipping straight past 0.2.1 and on to 0.2.2 today. Now BioCorder includes installation instructions for Apple OS X and Windows XP.

Biocorder 0.2.2 Linux/OS X

Biocorder 0.2.2 Windows

Biocorder Beta Released

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:57:29 -0500

Our first public beta is available for download. We'd love to have your feedback!

Download BioCorder 0.2.0

Demo Site

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:09:25 -0500

There is a BioCorder demo site available. Feel free to tinker with the data. It will be reset on occasion.

Username: guest
Password: guest

BioCorder demo

SPARQL example

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 13:04:31 -0500

Quite nice little story on SPARQL at O'Reilly's Developer blogs. Food for thought (i.e., this nis soemthing it would be cool for us to do...)

What is Web 2.0?

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:08:20 -0400

Tim O'Reilly has posted a meme map of Web 2.0, from the "What is Web 2.0?" brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005. Any of these issues sound familiar?

Web2.0 MemeMap

More info on this is published here

Digital identity

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:43:37 -0400

To make the decentralised vision for BioCorder a reality we will ideally need a decentralised system for authenticating and managing real-world user identities online. Rod Page has suggested OpenID as a possible solution. For a great presentation on the issues surrounding digital identification take a look at Dick Hardt’s keynote address at OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) 2005.

Related projects

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 15:20:35 -0400

A non-exhaustive list of projects of relevance to BioCorder. See also the entries under Standards, Schema, Protocols:

The Semantic Web

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:18:32 -0400

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way that it can be easily processed by computers on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database. Information on the Semantic Web is maintained in a structured form on web servers, and is fairly easy for both computers and people to work with.

Progress

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 18:12:01 -0400

Three months into the project (Sept. 2005), BioCorder is at the proof of concept stage. We are deploying Life Science Identifiers (LSID’s) within our current web databases (more info here) and converting these databases to output Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements. These are prerequisites of the Semantic Web.

Google Earth is here!

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 10:29:21 -0400

Google have gone 3D with the launch of Google Earth, a downloadable application which lets you virtually travel to anywhere (as long as its in Canada, the US or UK!) in 3D. Google Earth includes pictures of major cities, some of which you can tilt to see 3D terrain and buildings. What is neat is the ability to annotate, save and share your searches.

The basic subscription ($20) includes GPS device support, the ability to import spreadsheets, drawing tools and better printing. Otherwise there is a free version without some of these features.

NOMENCLATOR ZOOLOGICUS, vols 1-9 online

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:47:47 -0400

A LIST OF THE NAMES OF THE GENERA AND SUBGENERA IN ZOOLOGY FROM THE TENTH EDITION OF LINNAEUS 1758 TO THE END OF 1994, edited by SHEFFIELD AIREY NEAVE is now online. I presume there is a web services interface for this? uBio is involved, so there might be.

http://uio.mbl.edu/NomenclatorZoologicus/

Databases in peril

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:30:44 -0400

A couple of interesting pieces in this weeks Nature on life science databases. The first looks at the longevity of life science databases and the apparent desire of funding agencies to support new initiatives, often at the expense of ongoing database infrastructure projects. The second is a brief note highlighting concerns about the future of BIND - the database to which some journals produced by the Nature Publishing Group submit their authors bio-molecular interaction data to.

Tag it

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:06:55 -0400

In an interesting commentary piece, Barend Mons looks at the merits of tagging life science data, particularly with respect to electronic publishing. He advocates the development of tools to automate the semantic enrichment of text and data without forcing restrictive vocabularies and ontology’s on authors. Furthermore, he outlines (although not in so many words) the necessity of globally unique identifiers to make this happen.

AJAX

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:21:57 -0400

AJAX ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is getting some press, based in part probably on Google Maps. The basic idea has been around a little while, using the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest.

This technology would be fun to use in any web development we do. I thought about using it for the Taxonomic Search Engine, but when I started support for XMLHttpRequest wasn't great.