Rod Page recently alerted me to iNaturalist. This is a very beautiful website that invites you to “record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world”. It is essentially a mashup of content from Wikipedia and flickr, pinned around the Catalogue of Life classification. Users can submit their own observation data linked with photos through their flickr account, and build life lists of the species they have seen. There are Google Map mashups and a neat time-line that allows users to see the date of their observations (something that would be vital for birders). You can also submit requests for species identifications through a forum, along the lines of the flickr group “ID Please”.

A couple of my presentations (as of May 12, 08) have been featured on the front page of the SlideShare website. They have chosen a recent one I gave as part of the Voyage of Discovery lecture series at the NHM, and an old one on the Scratchpad project. After messing about with SlideShare and Google Docs I decided to opt for SlideShare.

Wow – I got an invite to Nature and O’Reilly’s Science Foo camp 2008! Without question my experiences last year led me to conclude that this was simply the best science gathering ever. To get reinvited back is a real honor. This unconference brings together people working on the bleeding edge of their fields, who are helping to define the future of science, art and technology. The eclectic mix of invitees dynamically build a schedule over the course of the meeting, which (as in previous years) is held over three days this August at Googleplex in Mountainview, CA. As George Dyson noted from last years experience, the resulting schedule presents you with "the impossible choice" of deciding which sessions to attend.

The complete proceedings of London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) have recently gone online. This fantastic website allows users to view the details of almost 200,000 criminal trials held at the court from 1674 to 1913. I have already spent several hours browsing the site! Since this digitization project has many parallels with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (a project to scan the literature describing all 1.8 million known species) I thought I’d compare the two:

Mid-April I attended the first review of the Encyclopedia of Life Biodiversity Informatics Group (BIG). This is the team based at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole that is charged with delivering the web component of the Encyclopedia of Life project. As a member of EOL’s Informatics Advisory Group (IAG) we were present to take stock of the bioinformatics component one year in to this ten-year project. The review culminated in report that highlights priorities for BIG in the coming months. Rod Page sets out the tone of this review inEOL’s official blog, and I hope that the full document will be publicly available soon. In the mean time here are a few personal impressions based on the major themes from the meeting:

The Encyclopedia of Life is here (well sort of). The lucky few who managed to get through the traffic are treated to 25 "exemplar" pages illustrating the type of content EOL aspires to get for all species; thirty thousand less detailed pages (thanks largely to FishBase); and a million stubs (courtesy of Species-2000). By chance I happened to be running a lecture and practical on launch day as part of the Natural History Museum's MSc course in taxonomy and biodiversity. The lab was on "Computerized Identification" and provided a perfect opportunity to get some feedback on the first release from 25 web savvy students . Because this was on the morning (GMT) of EOL's launch day, we had unfettered access to the site before America woke up and EOL's servers fell over.

Single Sign On (SSO) has become an issue in a project I am working on, so I thought I’d say a few words on this here, lest I keep repeating myself. For the uninitiated SSO is a method of decentralized access control that enables a user to identify themselves with a common piece of information, and gain access to multiple SSO enabled resources. On top of these systems, trust mechanisms can be built that authorize particular sets of users to access particular set of resources. As is widely discussed elsewhere, identity and trust are two separate issues when it comes to authentication. Trust first requires identity, although the two are often conflated. SSO is advantageous because it helps eliminate password fatigue, the problem of having multiple passwords for different resources. SSO is also potentially more secure, and makes for a better user experience.

EOL endorses intelligent design. This is one of the messages a naive reader might take from reading an interview with Paddy Patterson in this weeks Nature. Paddy is one of the architects of the Encyclopedia of Life project, and is leading the development of EOL’s informatics infrastructure. Of course, EOL does not endorse intelligent design, or any particular viewpoint for that matter. Paddy’s message is that EOL will allow people to create a customized view of the Encyclopedia that can be censored not offend the sensibilities of particular groups of users. Unfortunately I am not sure most of EOL’s potential contributors will see it this way.