[HELICONIUS] heliconius.org & butterflybase

[Jim Mallet]

Dear Alexie and others,

At 17:28 08/03/2006, you wrote:
>Hello hello... Am I the one to devirginise this email list? I hope I'm
>worth it.

As the parent of the virginal HELICONIUS list, I like to protect my child, 
and I believe that she dealt effectively with your advances!  Anyway, I 
think you will find that there were some incestuous messages in her 
cavities before yours.

>I'm taking requests on feature development for ButterflyBase. Also we
>can start a discussion of whether we want to set up a dedicated
>www.heliconius.org website server with all the helic info as well as lab
>pages. One person from each lab will responsible for updating one bit of
>the Heliconius wunderworld. It's good for funding applications... eh i
>mean public image.

General information pages.
I am not sure that we should be doing much in the way of public relations 
or school-level science-type work -- I don't think we need popular pieces 
available on Heliconius butterflies or anything like that.  But perhaps 
that wasn't what you meant.

What we do need, perhaps, is pointers to the literature on any particular 
topic, such as to review articles on evolution, colour pattern genetics, 
host plant ecology, etc.  We should also attempt to digitise theses and 
other unpublished grey literature, old literature no longer available, 
especially in Latin American libraries or information that still is not 
online anywhere (such as some of the Zoologica, NY articles) etc., 
unpublished data not available in online appendices (and some that is), 
e.g. alignments etc.  I would be happy to oversee efforts in some topics 
like this.  There is already a certain amount of Heliconius information 
already on the www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim/ website, and it seems to me that 
this kind of provision of information could be improved, for example a more 
snazzy and informative http://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim/helicinf.htm page, 
or a series of such pages could itemize different kinds of information.

The location of Heliconius information.
Whether or not the actual pages are online on www.heliconius.org 's own 
server should not matter from the point of view of the heliconius 
community.  A central heliconius.org page will have pointers to information 
occurring on any the servers of the partcular labs hosting the data.  We 
can also think about mirroring information later for safe keeping.

Who will now host the Heliconius.org pages?
Incidentally, with Chris Jiggins' impending move to Cambridge, 
heliconius.org will presumably want move server as well.  I could offer you 
space on www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome. A subdirectory like 
www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/heliconius/ makes a certain amount of sense anyway in 
my overall grandiose ambitions for the Taxome Project.  UCL lets me have 
reasonably large amounts of space on their central servers, and if it isn't 
TOO, too large, I think they will give me more whenever I need it. (Whole 
genome sequence information, perhaps will start to become getting too large 
for them, without scoring proper income to fund the server space, I don't 
know!)  So if Cambridge are more sniffy about this sort of thing, you 
should realize you are free to use /taxome as a home (it has its own 
separate account). (Many universities, and especially museums like the NHM 
are extremely sniffy, and have lots of annoying restrictions on web page 
formats and content)

The advantages of managed university servers.
When we're really rich, and can afford paid IS experts to run a server 
properly and securely, then we'll undoubtedly need our own servers.  But 
while we are still a cottage industry, it makes sense to use the free 
security and management services of a well-set up university IS department 
like UCL's.

Jim



>Here are some section suggestions
>-Plain speak of our research (incl. any school level science facts
>someone might have already generated).
>-Ecological data (habitats, distribution, phylogenies).
>-Morphological data of species, races, hybrids.
>-Genomic data (i.e. Butterflybase).
>-Genetic Data (inc. primer database, crossing results people have
>accumulated (specimendb?) etc).
>-others
>
>I think the first point should be tackled as soon as possible. my humble
>opionion is that it will be good for a genome application
>
>As Owen has suggested elsewhere, it will be good idea to utilise WiKi
>technology on this. we will see...
>
>enjoy the snow/sand/jungle
>
>Alexie Papanicolaou
>http://www.halcyoni.org
>'Scientists' from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are
>now asserting that the long-held 'theory of gravity' is flawed, and they
>have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
>"What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity
>waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever
>He wants.'"
>-theonion.com
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>HELICONIUS mailing list
>HELICONIUS at ucl.ac.uk
>http://www.mailinglists.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/heliconius

James Mallet
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim/