Ebbe Nielson (1950-2001) was the director of the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO, and a leader in what was at the time, the emerging discipline of biodiversity informatics. In recognition of Ebbe Nielson's seminal role in the field of Biodiversity Informatics, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in 2002 instigated the Ebbe Nielson prize. This award is given annually to "a promising researcher who is combining biosystematics and biological diversity informatics research that supports the objectives of GBIF in an exciting and novel way." For 2008, I was lucky enough to win the award! Needless to say am absolutely delighted. What follows is a gushing thank you to those who have helped contribute to me winning this prize! For those sensitive to such sentimentalism, look away now!

According to the judges I was given the prize for the sum total of my work, but the key innovation they highlighted was the Scratchpads - a tool based on Drupal to help communities of taxonomists manage, share and publish biodiversity on the Web. The Scratchpad project is very much a collaborative effort, borne in part under the auspices of EDIT, the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy. For this reason I owe considerable debt of gratitude to my two main EDIT collaborators. First and foremost is Simon Rycroft, the senior developer on the project. I have worked with Simon for several years (notably on the precursor to the Scratchpads - some thing called BioCorder), and co supervised Simon’s Computer Science MSc with Rod Page at the University of Glasgow. Simon has written most of the Scratchpad modules specific to systematics. Simon also manages the virtual server, within which all the Scratchpad sites are hosted. Secondly I want to thank Dave Roberts. Dave is the EDIT work package leader at the NHM, and was instrumental in getting the project established. He provided the political and administrative cover for the project, and helps drive the project forward within EDIT. I think it is fair to say that without the particular combination of Dave, Simon and myself, the Scratchpad project would never have existed.

Other key people to thank include Mauro Gonzalez (our initial Scratchpad developer who did a fantastic job establishing the initial code base), Ben Scott (who developed our highly customized version of Panels); Irina Brake, Vladimir Blagoderov and Edward Baker (power users whose enthusiasm and energy have done much to further the project), and Kehan Harman (newest member of the team who is building several sites supporting selected GBIF projects). Within the NHM entomology department I also thank Malcolm Scoble and Chris Lyal who have given me the freedom to pursue this project when I might otherwise have been focusing on lice. Also Quentin Wheeler, who created my post of "cybertaxonomist", and probably never realized quite what he was getting when he hired me. Quentin has since moved on to pastures new, and it is fair to say we don't always agree on the process of delivering his "new taxonomy” (see for example my review of his recent book). However, in terms of our long-term vision we are completely aligned, and on this point his efforts in the taxonomic community, with infrastructures like the International Institute of Species Exploration and his support of fundamental alpha taxonomic research are key to delivering this. Finally a huge thank you to Rod Page, without whom quite simply I would not be working in science.

This is an extraordinary time for biodiversity informatics - sometimes dubbed cybertaxonomy. The field is coming of age, as the discipline moves on from a rather lengthy and self centered obsession about standards and data models, to one of building tools that people actually use. This is not only helping the taxonomic / systematic biology community to become more productive, but also exposing their work to entirely new audiences, many of whom have much to contribute to our common goal of documenting and describing the diversity of life. But with all this talk of informatics and cybertaxonomy it is important not to loose sight of our final goal. Technology is a means to this end, rather than an end in itself. Tools like the Scratchpads will help us achieve this goal more quickly, but in the long run it is the taxonomy that counts, since this taxonomy will be around a lot longer than any of the tools we create.

PS. Apologies for this rather self centered post - normal service will resume shortly!