Sharing biodiversity data on Atlas of Living Australia

Australia's biodiversity data is being shared on the wonderful new site, The Atlas of Living Australia (http://www.ala.org.au/) which was launched in November 2010 . This is an example of shared data on a huge scale and presented in a visual way that people can relate to.

The Atlas of Living Australia is a "collaborative, national project focused on making biodiversity information more accessible and useable online". The site includes sections where you:

Get started including how-to tutorials
Explore information on species, maps, collections and regions
Share sightings, photos and information

The atlas is a result collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian museums, the Australian Government and other partners.

Media release states that the site "already holds over 23 million records on the distribution of Australia’s fauna and flora, in addition to maps, images and literature. Members of the public can help to build the database by contributing local photographs and information."

Go and check it out.

Is it online, digital or electronic information? mine Google data to find out

I love playing around with new Web tools. This week I had a look at the new Google Books Ngram Viewer which is a tool for comparative analysis of word usage. Google Books Ngram Viewer lets you enter words and phrases and then it does an analysis and displays a graph showing how often those words phrases have occurred. The data set being interrogated is a particular corpus of books on Google Books generated in July 2009.

We often have discussions about the terms: "online information", "electronic information" and "digital information". When you do a comparative analysis of those three phrases on Google Books Ngram Viewer from 1940 onwards, you get the graphs above, showing that "electronic information" (red line), is the most commonly used term, followed by digital information" (green line), while "online information" (blue line) has definitely plateaued.

Here are a few blog posts explaining more about the new tool: The Google Books Ngram Viewer from +Datavisualization.CH and Charting the Epic Battle of “Geek” vs. “Nerd”

Will this sort of analysis will be a boon for linguistics' scholars, or will it just remain a fun tool to explore?