July 24, 2008
MBLWHOI Library Develops Taxonomy Toy
By Joseph Caputo
Cathy Norton may be on to something: Bioinformatics toys for scientists. Sure, they won’t be as popular as Super Soakers or Frisbees, but hers is a niche audience. Currently on the market is Taxatoy, a computer interface that lets users create customizable graphs to depict the number and variety of species discovered since 1750, when the Latin classification system developed by Carl Linnaeus began. (Using the program, one can learn that out of the nearly 2.3 million listed species, 31 are lobsters). The tool was developed by the Marine Biolgical Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MBLWHOI) Library in 2007 and is now freely accessible online. http://www.mbl.edu/news/features/taxatoy.html [scb]

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