iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies

Rod Page has extended some cool work and made a nice tree viewable in GoogleEarth. Take a look at the picture below. And he may well add this as a facility in his amazing TreeViewX – bump. Rod, where’s the KML file (or am I missing something?) – I wanted to see if this would work in Google maps as they now support loading KML files.

iPhylo: Google Earth phylogenies
Now, for something completely different. I’ve been playing with Google Earth as a phylogeny viewer, inspired by Bill Piel’s efforts, the cool avian flu visualisation Janies et al. published in Systematic Biology (doi:10.1080/10635150701266848), and David Kidd’s work.

Bauble : biodiversity collection manager

Bauble : biodiversity collection manager
Just saw a link to this on GBIF – looks very useful and do I see a hint of Ubuntu in there somewhere?

About Bauble

Bauble is a software application to help you (yes you) manage a collection of biodiversity specimens. It is intended to be used by botanic gardens, herbaria, arboreta, etc. to manage their collection information. It is a open, free, cross-platform alternative to BG-Base and similiar software.

Goals

* Intuitive – the interface for Bauble is designed to be simple and elegant but no less functional.
* Extensible – developers and institutions should be able to extend the application to customize it to their needs.
* Connected – ideally Bauble will easily access relevant information online, such as connecting to GBIF to look up information on a species.
* more, more, more…

RDFa Primer 1.0

Must remember to look at RDFa Primer 1.0 recommended by Rod Page.

Now available — EndNote Web via ISI Web of Science at Rhodes University News

Now available — EndNote Web via ISI Web of Science
This is brilliant – now if only we could do this from connotea or citeulike – who’s going to write a plugin for Word or OpenOffice for these?

Talk at the KikForum

I gave a talk at the first meeting of the Kew Interactive Key Forum (KikForum) which seemed to go down quite well. I also managed to con some other people into giving some talks and all in all the meeting was received well. The most important thing is that we will try to keep doing this on a regular basis (every 2 months or so).

GrassBase has a custom search engine

I have added a Google custom search engine to grassbase and this makes things a lot easier for me to deal with.
you can add the search engine to your custom google homepage by clicking on the button below:

You can also use the search engine at the it’s website