Crowdsourcing science project for phylogenies?

Image via WikipediaThe idea behind crowdsourcing is that the answer to a question is often more likely to be correct if you average the answers from a large number of non-experts rather than a single expert in the field. The term "crowdsourcing" has also been used for projects that outsource repetitive or challenging work to a crowd via the internet.
I have been thinking of outsourcing the problem of conversion of embedded phylogenies in PDFs back to newick/nexus format and have been looking at various science projects that have used crowdsourcing.

The most impressive from my point of view is Galaxy Zoo which has already resulted in a number of publications and impressive discoveries. Astrophysicist use the crowd to categorise 1000s of galaxies and have expanded the crowd tasks to include matching images of galaxies with randomly simulated images.

Stardust@Home is another astrophysics project which asks that the crowd looks through images for dust particles brought back to earth by a spacecraft in 2006.

Another cool project is the Open Dinosaur Project which asks that the crowd aggregates published measurements of dinosaur limb bones for many different taxa from the literature and directly measured from specimens to study the evolutionary transitions from bipedality to quadrupedality.

Foldit is a computer game enabling the crowd to contribute to our understanding of how protein folds. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. The idea of using human's spare time to get further insight is genius!

Another game that might not be directly relevant to science is Google Image Labeler which I found rather addictive. Google gets users to label/tag images as a side-effect of playing a game and this is probably used to improve image searches on the web. I list it hear because I came across a few images of animals that in some cases were labeled down to the latin binomial.

UPDATE: An interesting new crowd sourcing project at http://www.oldweather.org/ to help gather information about past climates from hand written nautical records.

The phyloscape changes quickly, we need to build a better way to keep track of it

Since Hennig's 1969 major publication on the phylogeny of hexapod orders (Insecta + Entognatha), I have found more than 60 publications of phylogenies on the ordinal relationships within the group. Some may be re-analyses of the same data but it is still quite a large number of studies. Thirty-seven of these have been published in the last decade and this rapid change in the phylogenetic landscape of this group (and this is probably the case for many other lineages) is increasingly becoming hard to keep track of. Sure, you could do a regular Pubmed or WoS search for phylogen* + insecta but you then need to extract the phylogeny and put it in the context of previously published studies. Sure there are databases like TreeBase and PhyLoTa that provide ready-made phylogenetic reconstructions but the former has limited content and the latter has limited resolution at many nodes of interest.

It is important to have an up-to-date and complete image of the phylogenetic landscape of the groups we work on, even if the overall picture is blurry. This would provide a better idea of areas that require further taxonomic sampling and/or a larger number of characters to resolve the relationships of interest, it would also provide a valuable resource for comparative studies. For this to work, information needs to be integrated between different databases like PhyLoTA, TreeBASE, GenBank, Treefam etc. in an automated fashion as well as defrosting phylogenetic reconstructions from previously published studies (see my previous post). Perhaps a simple repository of third-party phylogenetic reconstructions would help: submitter - publication reference - figure number - phylogeny (newick, nexus, phyloxml, nexml ....). Although would anybody submit data? Perhaps I need to think of a way to reward those that do/

Reference

Hennig, W. 1969. Die Stammesgeschichte der Insekten. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Kramer.