Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Challenge Demo online

I've put the my Elsevier Challenge demo online. I'm still loading data into it, so it will grow over the next day or so. There's also the small matter of writing a paper on what's under the hood of the demo. Feel free to leave comments on the demo home page.

For some example of what the project does, take a look at Mitochondrial paraphyly in a polymorphic poison frog species (Dendrobatidae; D. pumilio), then compare it to the same publication in Science Direct (doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2007.06.010).

2 comments:

Drycafe said...

Very Cool! Did you note the range polygon on http://iphylo.org/~rpage/challenge/www/uri/0dd44cbe1e130d8e4bd73130a7d139a1 ? Those frogs must a hard time surviving in northern Canada and Greenland :)

As for MySQL's crappy spatial support, have you tried PostGIS? It worked well for the few things that I tried it.

Roderic Page said...

In this case it's my mistake, there's a stray value for this study, which I'll fix. MySQL's spatial support is poor, but it's not the cause of this errant polygon. To keep things simple I compute the convex hull of the set of localities. There are more elegant methods (see http://biodivertido.blogspot.com/2008/11/flickr-creating-polygons-out-of-points.html ), but that's for another time. I may try PostGIS, but the last thing I want to do right now is learn another database.