Last week (October 5-9 2015) @deepreef, @dimus, @alexander-myltsev had a workshop in Honolulu at Bishop Museum to sync ideas, learn more about each other work, and design new generation of services. The meeting had been productive and I think in the end our two GN groups get integrated. We are moving all our code under one roof at GitHub now.
We had an interesting meeting with @jar398 from Open Tree of Life trying to figure out how can we connect OTOL with all the other resources on the web, and @deepreef suggested to use his BioGuid project for these purposes. We moved BioGuid to github and added all the GitHubbish bells and whistles like a blog and [gitter][bioguid-gitter] for example to the project. I think it is pretty cool that we will have a downloadable csv file from all the IDs @deepreef collected that can be used by all other projects in new exiting ways.
Another interesting conversation was with Phylotastic project. We worked on an idea of making an application which will allow convert pictures of scientific names people take at museums or from pages of research papers into texts, extract names appeared there and build phylo-trees from these names using Open Tree. Also the app would show pictures from Encyclopedia of Life and pages from Wikipedia. Such app will mash up interfaces of Global Names to find and reconcile names, Open Tree to build trees, and EOL to get information about species.