BACKGROUND: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a large digital archive of legacy biological literature, comprising over 31 million pages scanned from books, monographs, and journals. During the digitisation process basic metadata about the scanned items is recorded, but not article-level metadata. Given that the article is the standard unit of citation, this makes it difficult to locate cited literature in BHL. Adding the ability to easily find articles in BHL would greatly enhance the value of the archive. DESCRIPTION: A service was developed to locate articles in BHL based on matching article metadata to BHL metadata using approximate string matching, regular expressions, and string alignment. This article locating service is exposed as a standard OpenURL resolver on the BioStor web site http://biostor.org/openurl/. This resolver can be used on the web, or called by bibliographic tools that support OpenURL. CONCLUSIONS: BioStor provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising articles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BioStor is available from http://biostor.org/.

BACKGROUND: Linking together the data of interest to biodiversity researchers (including specimen records, images, taxonomic names, and DNA sequences) requires services that can mint, resolve, and discover globally unique identifiers (including, but not limited to, DOIs, HTTP URIs, and LSIDs). RESULTS: bioGUID implements a range of services, the core ones being an OpenURL resolver for bibliographic resources, and a LSID resolver. The LSID resolver supports Linked Data-friendly resolution using HTTP 303 redirects and content negotiation. Additional services include journal ISSN look-up, author name matching, and a tool to monitor the status of biodiversity data providers. CONCLUSION: bioGUID is available at http://bioguid.info/. Source code is available from http://code.google.com/p/bioguid/.

A major challenge facing biodiversity informatics is integrating data stored in widely distributed databases. Initial efforts have relied on taxonomic names as the shared identifier linking records in different databases. However, taxonomic names have limitations as identifiers, being neither stable nor globally unique, and the pace of molecular taxonomic and phylogenetic research means that a lot of information in public sequence databases is not linked to formal taxonomic names. This review explores the use of other identifiers, such as specimen codes and GenBank accession numbers, to link otherwise disconnected facts in different databases. The structure of these links can also be exploited using the PageRank algorithm to rank the results of searches on biodiversity databases. The key to rich integration is a commitment to deploy and reuse globally unique, shared identifiers [such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs)], and the implementation of services that link those identifiers.

BACKGROUND: TreeBASE is currently the only available large-scale database of published organismal phylogenies. Its utility is hampered by a lack of taxonomic consistency, both within the database, and with names of organisms in external genomic, specimen, and taxonomic databases. The extent to which the phylogenetic knowledge in TreeBASE becomes integrated with these other sources is limited by this lack of consistency. DESCRIPTION: Taxonomic names in TreeBASE were mapped onto names in the external taxonomic databases IPNI, ITIS, NCBI, and uBio, and graph G of these mappings was constructed. Additional edges representing taxonomic synonymies were added to G, then all components of G were extracted. These components correspond to "name clusters", and group together names in TreeBASE that are inferred to refer to the same taxon. The mapping to NCBI enables hierarchical queries to be performed, which can improve TreeBASE information retrieval by an order of magnitude. CONCLUSION: TBMap database provides a mapping of the bulk of the names in TreeBASE to names in external taxonomic databases, and a clustering of those mappings into sets of names that can be regarded as equivalent. This mapping enables queries and visualisations that cannot otherwise be constructed. A simple query interface to the mapping and names clusters is available at http://linnaeus.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/tbmap.

BACKGROUND: The taxonomic name of an organism is a key link between different databases that store information on that organism. However, in the absence of a single, comprehensive database of organism names, individual databases lack an easy means of checking the correctness of a name. Furthermore, the same organism may have more than one name, and the same name may apply to more than one organism. RESULTS: The Taxonomic Search Engine (TSE) is a web application written in PHP that queries multiple taxonomic databases (ITIS, Index Fungorum, IPNI, NCBI, and uBIO) and summarises the results in a consistent format. It supports "drill-down" queries to retrieve a specific record. The TSE can optionally suggest alternative spellings the user can try. It also acts as a Life Science Identifier (LSID) authority for the source taxonomic databases, providing globally unique identifiers (and associated metadata) for each name. CONCLUSION: The Taxonomic Search Engine is available at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ and provides a simple demonstration of the potential of the federated approach to providing access to taxonomic names.

BACKGROUND: The NCBI taxonomy provides one of the most powerful ways to navigate sequence data bases but currently users are forced to formulate queries according to a single taxonomic classification. Given that there is not universal agreement on the classification of organisms, providing a single classification places constraints on the questions biologists can ask. However, maintaining multiple classifications is burdensome in the face of a constantly growing NCBI classification. RESULTS: In this paper, we present a solution to the problem of generating modifications of the NCBI taxonomy, based on the computation of an edit script that summarises the differences between two classification trees. Our algorithms find the shortest possible edit script based on the identification of all shared subtrees, and only take time quasi linear in the size of the trees because classification trees have unique node labels. CONCLUSION: These algorithms have been recently implemented, and the software is freely available for download from http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/forest/.

MOTIVATION: Supertree methods have been often identified as a possible approach to the reconstruction of the 'Tree of Life'. However, a limitation of such methods is that, typically, they use just leaf-labelled phylogenetic trees to infer the resulting supertree. RESULTS: In this paper, we describe several new supertree algorithms that extend the allowable information that can be used for phylogenetic inference. These algorithms have been recently implemented and we describe here two illustrative applications. AVAILABILITY: These new algorithms are freely available for application at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/build.pl.

UNLABELLED: Circles is a program for inferring RNA secondary structure using maximum weight matching. The program can read in an alignment in FASTA, ClustalW, or NEXUS format, compute a maximum weight matching, and export one or more secondary structures in various file formats. AVAILABILITY: The program is available at no cost from http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/circles/ and requires Windows 95/98/NT. CONTACT: [email protected]

SUMMARY: RadCon is a Macintosh program for manipulating and analysing phylogenetic trees. The program can determine the Cladistic Information Content of individual trees, the stability of leaves across a set of bootstrap trees, produce the strict basic Reduced Cladistic Consensus profile of a set of trees and convert a set of trees into its matrix representation for supertree construction. AVAILABILITY: The program is free and available at http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/ approximately jthorley/radcon/radcon.html.

SUMMARY: GeneTree is a program for comparing gene and species trees using reconciled trees. The program can compute the cost of embedding a gene tree within a species tree, visually display the location and number of gene duplications and losses, and search for optimal species trees. AVAILABILITY: The program is free and is available at ((http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac. uk/rod/genetree/genetree.html)).

Roderic D.M. Page; Tree View: An application to display phylogenetic trees on personal computers, Bioinformatics, Volume 12, Issue 4, 1 August 1996, Pages 357–3