The Modern Palimpsest

Leigh Dodds included iSpecies in his recent post on the scientific paper as modern palimpest. He writes:

iSpecies is a nice example of a science "mashup" that illustrates an alternative search interface for finding related content. I used the false results that can appear when performing simple keyword searches to reinforce the need for standard identifiers. (The need for a common, scoped identifier for authors, is a particular hobby horse of mine).

Among the false results is the image of oil tanker (among other things) that Yahoo provides when searching for "Apus apus."

Character coding issues with Google Scholar

Tanja points out that results for articles with German titles can look awful (e.g., try searching on Erica inflata). This is a problem with Google Scholar, which corrupts the characters. To verify this, do the search directly in Google Scholar. A workaround, if one had time, would be to screen scrape some of the source sites. For example, Springer's web site could be scraped to get the correct title, and a DOI. One more thing for the to do list...

NatureServe

NatureServe, a "non-profit conservation organization that provides the scientific information and tools needed to help guide effective conservation action" have announced an XML schema for their proposed web service. NatureServe's focus (I think) is on rare and endangered species in North America, but some of their data and/or schema may be useful for iSpecies.

Science NetWatch

Science magazine's NetWatch column for 16 December 2005 mentions iSpecies.

The Simplicity of the Semantic Web

The Simplicity of the Semantic Web
Originally uploaded by kinetisonic.

This is simply to remind me of where iSpecies needs to be heading...