THINKeEXTENSION

Roderic Page is a very clever man. We’ve never met, but I know he’s clever, because sometimes I can almost see his brain working. I see the fruit of Roderic’s significant grey matter via his considerable eExtension output. I’ll give you a quicklist so you know I’m not pulling your leg.

Blogs

• bioGUID – an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects
• Bird Supertree – an experiment in “open source phylogenetics”
• iPhylo – brain dump of ideas on phyloinformatics
• iSpecies – a record of the development of the iSpecies search engine
• Of Birds and Lice – about host-parasite co-evolution in general with an emphasis on host-parasite co-speciation in lice and birds
• Semant – a record of efforts to create a triple store for data about ants, and related musings

Photosharing

• Flickr – Roderic uses a free Flickr account to share photos

Microblogging

• Twitter – allows Roderic to update and converse with his Twitter contacts quickly

Aggregation Service

• Friendfeed – Roderic uses to aggregate much of his online content in one place

Social Networks

• LinkedIn – Roderic’s profile on LinkedIn

• Facebook – Roderic uses Facebook to stay in touch with friends and contacts

• Technorati – tracks blog conversations

Social Bookmarking

• Delicious – allows Roderic to share great content he finds on the web with anyone who is interested

Believe it or not there are more places to find Roderic online, however by now I think you get the point, he’s a “hyper connected power user“.

The amazing thing is all these services listed above are free, so cost is no barrier to getting started in eExtension. In addition none of these services require technical skill beyond what you have required to find this website or send an email today.

The reason I wanted to write about Roderic today, is the innovative way he is approaching the visualisation of taxonomy for studies he wishes to share online. This one is especially for the biologists, zoologists, ecologists and flora and fauna geeks. Roderic describes his solution below.

For each paper I extract the taxonomic names (via the Genbank sequences linked to the paper), group them into genera, and then construct a treemap where the size of each cell is proportional to the number of species in each genus. Then I harvest images from Flickr and/or Yahoo’s image search APIs and display a thumbnail with a link to the image source. Source: iPhylo: What is a study about? Treemaps of taxa

The entire article describing Roderic’s creation of the treemaps can be found at iPhylo: What is a study about? Treemaps of taxa.

The friction associated with Extensionists and Researchers engaging in this type of innovation becomes significantly less, with content being freely shared on the internet and with the ease of integrating of tools like those mentioned above. The images Roderic uses from Flickr have all been shared using a Creative Commons license, which allows content owners to set guidelines for how their content can be used by others. In return those sharing the content receive more exposure for their contribution.

As more people and organisations like Roderic, use eExtension to fearlessly share knowledge that can improve agriculture and our environment, our world can only become a better place. Then innovation like Roderic’s Taxonomy Treemap can flourish and accelerate the global response to the challenges agriculture and environment face. Naturally these tools and content can also provide very local and private solutions as well at times when that is appropriate.

What’s on your wish list for Agricultural and or Environmental knowledge advancement? Leave us a comment below, so the collective brainpower of all THINKeEXTENSION readers can begin to address it.

Tags: eExtension, Taxonomy-Treemap, Extension, Visualising-Research