Reweaving the tapestry: a supertree of birds.

Our knowledge of the avian tree of life remains uncertain, particularly at deeper levels due to the rapid diversification early in their evolutionary history. They are the most abundant land vertebrate on the planet and have been of great historical interest to systematists. Birds are also economically and ecologically important and as a result are intensively studied, yet despite their importance and interest to humans around 13% of taxa currently on the endangered species list perhaps as a result of human activity.

Linking NCBI to Wikipedia: a wiki-based approach.

The NCBI Taxonomy underpins many bioinformatics and phyloinformatics databases, but by itself provides limited information on the taxa it contains. One readily available source of information on many taxa is Wikipedia. This paper describes iPhylo Linkout, a Semantic wiki that maps taxa in NCBI's taxonomy database onto corresponding pages in Wikipedia.