The Lagotto application is a Rails app that collects and serves up via RESTful API article level metrics data for research objects. So far, this application has only been applied to scholarly articles, but will see action on datasets soon. Martin Fenner has lead the development of Lagotto. He recently set up a discussion site if you want to chat about it. The application has a nice GUI interface, and a quite nice RESTful API. ...
Eduard Szöcs and I started developing a taxonomic toolbelt for the R language a while back , which lets you interact with a multitude of taxonomic databases on the web. We have a paper in F1000Research if you want to find out more (see here). I thought it would be fun to rewrite some of taxize in other languages to learn more languages. Ruby and Python made the most sense to try. I did try others (Julia, Node), but gave up on those for now. The goal here isn’t to port taxize to Python and Ruby right now - it’s for me to learn myself some coding. ...
Many R packages/tools have come out recently for doing ecology and evolution. All of the below were described in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, except for spider, which came out in Molecular Ecology Resources. Here are some highlights. mvabund paper - get R pkg Model-based analysis of multivariate abundance data. Visualising data, fitting predictive models, checking assumptions, hypothesis testing. popdemo paper - get R pkg Population demography using projection matrix analysis. motmot paper - get R pkg Models of trait macroevolution on trees spider paper - get R pkg Analysis of species identity and evolution, with particular reference to DNA barcoding BaSTA paper - get R pkg Bayesian estimation of age-specific survival from incomplete mark–recapture/recovery data with covariates abc paper - get R pkg Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) RNetLogo paper - get R pkg Running and exploring individual-based models implemented in NetLogo phytools paper - get R pkg Tools for phylogenetic comparative biology smatr paper - get R pkg Estimation and inference about allometric lines RBrownie paper - get R pkg ? Testing hypotheses about rates of evolutionary change polytomy resolver paper - get R pkg Resolve polytomies on dated phylogenies with their R scripts [here][]. And a cool tool came out for the Python programming language. ...