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.

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/

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.

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 ( 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.

Drew Koning has developed TaxonGrab, a useful tool written in PHP for harvesting taxonomic names from literature. With this kind of tool, names could be harvested to populate taxonomic name servers. Better yet, imagine tools like this automatically crawling and linking taxonomic names from all those full text PDF's you have.

A post appeared on Slashdot today (27 May) regarding the new "Search on TAP" semantic search tool released by the TAP folk at Stanford University. RobMcCool writes:

"At Stanford KSL, we really like the Semantic Web.

This from a Bio-IT World report on Tim Berners-Lee's talk at the fourth Bio-IT World Conference + Expo in Boston.

Life scientists ... could find the Semantic Web a useful tool, and in so doing, “provide leadership to lots of other fields” in implementing this next-generation Web technology, Berners-Lee said. “At the moment, I see a huge amount of energy from people in life sciences, getting excited by the Semantic Web and what it can do to solve the big-idea problems.”

Rebecca Shapley's project Defining the ideal interface to search and browse online databases of natural history specimen collections is a nice source of ideas and links. See, for example, this posting by Louis Rosenfield.

Can anyone suggest some suitable RSS feeds we might link to in the right hand side block? I've included the feed from Nodalpoint for now but if you know of anything more appropriate, leave a comment or e-mail me with suggestions.