Last year we did get the second round of funding for Global Names Architecture development. Our first grant had been about exploration of how to find scientific names in texts, how to crossmap different spelling variants of the same names to each other, how to connect names to literature collected at Biodiversity Heritage Library, how to organize scientific name usages, how to register new zoological scientific names electronically. Several intersting projects spanned out of this effort and you can read about them at Global Names site.

It was a hard year for Encyclopedia of Life where I work, and for Global Names. I did have to spend most of the first 8 months since our second NSF grant got funding helping EOL with system administration support and transfer EOL site from Harvard to Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It is done now, and I am happy to be able to work on Global Names project again!

What kind of resources do we have now? 2 months of Paddy (David Patterson) time, 2 months of Rich Pyle time, About a 1.5 years of mine, and 1 year of another developer. We also got 2 excellent participants for Google Summer of Code this year, so it is 6 months of their time as well. And a quest for further funding continues as I write.

Encyclopedia of Life kindly donated a lot of hardware, and Marine Biological Laboratory provides us with a whole rack of space, fast internet connection. So we are set for an exciting year ahead!

What are the plans? This grant covers work on name finding and name resolution. We try to find major use-cases (Arctos, EOL, iDigBio, Catalogue of Life, GBIF) and satisfy their needs. We expect it will cover needs of 90% of other users, and the remaining 10% of functionality will trickle by means of going through github issues, fixing bugs, adding features, thinking about new ideas.