Back last year at TDWG2008 in Fremantle there was a Wild Ideas session where people could propose crazy things that might not be serious or urgent. I gave a presentation called SpeciesIndex?: A practical alternative to fantasy mashups. This was meant to be a bit of fun but actually went down quiet well with a few people coming up to me afterward who were interest in it. A wiki page called SpeciesPages was created to flesh out the ideas.

The ideas presented in the paper to the conference and on the wiki are that each publisher of species pages. (i.e. anyone with a web site that has a page per species approach to taxonomy) should produce a SiteMap file that contains a list of just those pages and submits the location of the SiteMap to a register so that the pages could be indexed and other services built around them.

Over the intervening months I got to thinking about the idea some more  and playing around in the evenings with some code. Continue reading »

My Mukka coffee maker just arrived. It is great!

It is like a regular stove top espresso maker but you put milk in the top and it has a clever-valve-thing that froths the milk as it makes the espresso thus creating a  cappuccino. Bit tricky to get used to at first and not for the faint hearted. It sits there hissing on the flame then makes a clear ‘pop’ before the authentic throat hacking cappuccino sound as it does the frothing.

Does great with soya milk too.

I am working at home today so I can use it some more.

There is even a film here.

[Hint: take the valve off before separating the two halfs as it creates a vacuum when it cools]

I have been wanting to push people in the direction of semantic technologies for quite a while now. Mainly this has taken the form of weaning them off the notion that well formed or valid XML is a generic solution to data interoperability rather than just a application level data validation tool. The problem with my halfhearted campaign is summed up rather well by Iain Coleman in a piece for the latest NeSC News.

So with all these possibilities, why isn’t the semantic web being taken up more widely by life scientists? Well, the main issue is that there is not yet a semantic web application that just works, that is widely trusted, that has an easy interface and that scientists can just pick up and use immediately to improve their research. Part of this is the notorious e-Science incentives problem, where professional rewards come from creating complicated things you can write papers about rather than simple things that work for users. But even when researchers do focus on users’ needs, the amount of data they have to deal with keeps increasing, so even though tools have improved a lot in recent years, the problem has still become ever more difficult. – Iain Coleman (2009), NeSC News 66

I think this can be paraphrased as  “Advocates of the semantic web are all mouth and no trousers”. (In Texas this is apparently “All hat and no cattle”). It hits the nail on the head but Iain doesn’t suggest a solution. Might it be that the problem is with too early engagement. Really the user community (most scientists) should be shielded from this stuff until some one has a working tool for them to use.

If you think semantic technologies offer hope for wider biodiversity data integration “Seal up your lips and give no words but mum.” (Henry VI, Part 2). You will have to read the original article to find out where the Hittite sheep come in.

Maternal Grandparents Wedding (1928)

My maternal grandparents were in the Salvation Army. This is their wedding in 1928. It is worth clicking on the image and having a closer look. It is one of those photographs where you feel you can connect with the people in it. I wonder why it has that feel when some photos don’t. Was it something to do with the atmosphere of the day? I wonder if any of the children are alive today. They would be in their 80’s I guess.