[Taxacom] BioRSS

[Roderic Page]

Hi John,

Yes, this is being updated regularly as I mess about with the code, and explore adding other sources (such as Chinese language journals that you expressed a desire to see).

There isn’t a set time of day I add new content, but I hope to do this on a daily basis (yet another thing to automate). I will make the journal list available shortly (need to write some code to display it).

The original plan for this app was to use RSS feeds provided by journals to get the latest list of articles each journal publishes. While some publishers do support RSS many journals don’t, so I have to come up with other ways to get this information. RSS was very popular in the heyday of blogging and news feed readers but with the demise of Google Reader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader and related apps RSS has been fading away a bit, which is a pity.

Regarding bioinformatics and “big data”, I have my own issues with various projects (which I blogged about), but I think in this case the issue is that (a) it’s actually quite challenging to build a tool to poll the literature for new species - as I’m rapidly discovering - and (b) what are the incentives for providing such a service? I tend to think that people act rationally with respect to incentives, and so if things that you want to see happen aren’t happening then that’s a close that the  incentives aren’t there.

Regards,

Rod


On 25 Nov 2021, at 18:03, John Grehan via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>> wrote:

Rod,

Am I correct that the main page listing is automatically updated? At least
that is my impression. As I had the tab still up on my Browser today (25th)
I noticed the most recent listings to be Nov 24. If updating is constant,
is there a standard time of the day for this? A constant update would
certainly make for a convenient reference to check each day or whenever,
even for a limited range of publications, rather than having to constantly
check individual journals which is too time consuming. And it looks like
systematic articles turn up which gets me to biogeography which is my main
interest in being able to easily view new articles as they appear.

As for journal coverage, is it possible to see the full list of journals
currently scanned by your application? That would make it easy to suggest
additions. If there is no web link for that, please send the list to me at
my email address (or to Taxacom directly). Also, remind me of how your
program works - I presume it relies on journals or books having some kind
of web posting of their contents so your program can collate that
information.

While I might whine on a bit about the problem of limited coverage,
something like this is certainly better than nothing. It is rather
depressing to think that after some decades of so-called 'bioinformatics',
'big data' and all the other rhetorical crap that was floated out there for
the big money grants etc, that this very basic knowledge base for the study
of biodiversity appears to have never been addressed. If it were, Rod would
not have to still be fiddling around trying to come up with a solution
several decades later. If ever there were a grant worth enterprise (to get
the funds necessary to locate and incorporate all relevant journals and
keep the system permanent) this would appear to fit the bill.

John Grehan
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