Data sharing platforms and linking and collating information from various websites

I am working backwards now, posting stuff from the previous few days. However, I think it important to write my thoughts down - for digesting this information myself more than for anyone else at this stage. All the same, any comments are welcome.
On Wednesday we tackled issues perhaps from more of a taxonomic angle, though they do refer more widely. A major issue that was raised was the availability of biological information on the web, and the fact that it is spread across many different websites that are not linked to one another. Rod Page (University of Glasgow) pointed out that when doing web searches, wikipedia is, in the (vast) majority of instances the primamary source that emerges. However, wiki is completely open source, so there are problems associated with wiki. In contrast, 'Encyclopedia of Life' (EOL), as an example of what would generally be considered more reliable info, is closed source and dependent on a single person for editing (or allowing edititing). Therefore, often EOL is not updated regularly. In addition, EOL has no reference list to indicate where information has oriinated from (in contrast to e.g. wiki). As an in-between, Rod Page and Vincent Smith (London Museum of Natural History) offered two alternatives. Vince spoke about scratchpads as a platform for taxonomists to share information. We played around on them a little. In general, they are user-friendly (for someone with my webpage-developing abailities esp.) They link to other databases, thereby providing information on phylogenies and taxonomy, nomenclature, geographic information (via GBIF), images, and other information. You can, of course, choose, what you would and would not like to have displayed on your site. Most importantly, you can invite people to contribute to the sites in various ways, giving them different levels of administrative rights. Also, you can choose which of the information is visible to all viewers of the website, and which is visible to only 'members' of the scratchpad group. That way, it is a useful platform for data exchange and allowing experts to update details of the page. Some of the taxonomists who were trying out the scratchpads at yesterday's workshop had minor suggestions for improvement, and, from discussions, it was clear that scratchpads are constantly being developed and improved. Rod Page, on the other hand, suggested semantic wikis as a way of exchanging data and, more importantly, link information from various websites into one website. The difference to scratchpads here is that the privacy level is not as high and that the user needs to put more effort into creating the websites. The user can, however, define more precisely what he needs for the site. He also presented new ideas, many still 'in development' on how, e.g., RSS feeds could be used to extract localty records. This was, again, something I was particularly interested in, as it could potentially be useful for me - if I could extract geographic information from RSS feeds, I potentially harvest a much wider data source. However, chatting with Rod it emerged that the accuracy of such an exercise - esp. for my purposes - would probably be compromised by such an approach. I will, however, keep track of Rod's blogs. He has many interesting and, in the world of bioinformatics, cutting edge ideas.