Evolution 2010 talk schedule for iCal

In a moment of madness brought on by trying to make sense of 10 Mb of conference schedule for Evolution 2010, I extracted the text from the schedule and created a series of crude iCal files that I can add to my iCal calendar on my Mac (and hence sync to my iPhone). This way I can set reminders of specific talks I want to see.

I'm making these ical files available here, on the understanding that you can use them entirely at your own risk (some talks may be missing due to errors in parsing the file).

Mashing up NCBI and Wikipedia using treemaps

Having made a first stab at mapping NCBI taxa to Wikipedia, I thought it might be fun to see what could be done with it. I've always wanted to get quantum treemaps working (quantum treemaps ensure that the cells in the treemap are all the same size, see my 2006[!] blog post for further description and links). After some fussing I have some code that seems to do the trick. As an example, here is a quantum treemap for Laurasiatheria.


The diagram shows the NCBI taxonomy subtree rooted on Laurasiatheria, with images (where available) from Wikipedia for the children of the the children of that node. In other words, the images correspond to the tips of the tree below:



There's a lot to be done to tidy this up, but there is potential to create a nice, visual way to navigate through the NCBI taxonomy (it might work well on the iPhone or iPad, for example).

NCBI to Wikipedia links are now live...

The 52,956 links from NCBI to Wikipedia that I've been busy creating are now "live." If you go to a NCBI taxon such as Sphaerius you'll see something like this:

Clicking the "Wikipedia" link takes you to the Wikipedia page for this taxon. You can see all the links to Wikipedia using the query loproviphylo[filter]. Here are some additional links to try:

NCBI	Wikipedia
8353	Xenopus
83698	Banksia
9766	Balaenoptera

Thanks to Scott Federhen and Kathy Kwan at NCBI for all their assistance in getting this into NCBI Linkout.

Fixing errors
There will be errors and omissions. The best way to fix these is by using the iPhylo Linkout wiki. The page for a NCBI taxon is always http://iphylo.org/linkout/Ncbi:xxxx where xxxx is the NCBI taxonomy id. You can edit/annotate the link there (click on the "edit with form" for a simple web form). I plan to regularly update the links based on this the wiki.

Future
NCBI Linkout provide access statistics so it will be interesting to see how much traffic goes from NCBI to Wikipedia. It will also be interesting to see if this is correlated with increased editing of those Wikipedia pages.