i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I came across an article about the BIObus, which is currently travelling across North America collecting insects and other invertebrates. The BIObus supports the Barcode of Life Project, which is a collaborative effort among researchers to create a digital identification system for life on Earth. Scientists take tissue samples from each specimen, extract DNA and then register the sample into a global database. The Barcode of Life project uses "DNA barcoding" to identify species, in the same fashion that supermarkets use barcodes to track product inventory.

In lecture, we talked about how domains of organizing systems are overlapping. I think the Barcode of Life project exemplies that. It presents an untraditional way of thinking about the notion of a library, scientific data and barcoding. It's a library that uses DNA for IO and IR. It uses barcoding to track inventory of scientific data, as opposed to the traditional applications of barcoding in the business world, such as in supermarkets and in the retail industry.

Anyway, I'm pretty intrigued by the area of biodiversity informatics, especially since it's an area in which computer science people can really collaborate with biologists and other people in the scientific community.