One of the advantages of making a custom Scratchpads profile for a particular group of users is that this allows us to tailor the functionality of a site to the specific needs of a particular community or project.
Scratchpads have been developed to be neutral to the nomenclatural codes (unlike SpeciesFile for example, which is developed to precisely follow the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature). While we want to keep as much as we can of what we do within eMonocot useful to zoologists, there are a few cases where the restriction to a subset of botany has allowed us to develop some useful botanically focused extensions. The inclusion of images from the World Orchid Iconography database is an example of this as I blogged about recently.
Another example that we have released today is a link to the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). IPNI has a databse of botanical publications and we now use their webservice to autocomplete various fields on the 'add bibliography' form on the eMonocot Scratchpads.
The IPNI publication autocomplete function in use. Click to enlarge.
Of course this integration with IPNI has applications for many non-eMonocot botanical Scratchpads - a good example of how the eMonocot project can contribute to the wider Scratchpads community.
