[Tdwg-phylo] publishing trees in CDAO as linked open data?

[Arlin Stoltzfus]

Dear all--

At the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) meeting last month, a  
sub-group of the phylogenetic standards working group started a  
project to assess "current best practices for publishing trees  
electronically".   At present, probably the best way to publish a tree  
is to use the TreeBASE submission process, which makes it possible to  
upload a NEXUS file and create associations of OTUs with taxon IDs,  
and of data rows with accessions, and so on.  But there are also some  
other possibilities.  The preliminary report is being assembled here:

   http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Phylogenetics/LinkingTrees2010

Our plan is (over the next 6 weeks) to get feedback on this  
preliminary report, then analyze the results and prepare a more  
extensive report for publication.

One possibility that we haven't examined yet is to publish a tree  
electronically by rendering it in RDF in the language of CDAO  
(Comparative Data Analysis Ontology) and then contributing it to the  
Linked-Open-Data cloud in some way.

Does anyone out there want to explore this idea and contribute the  
results to the TDWG project?   If so, please let me know.

Arlin
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Arlin Stoltzfus (arlin at umd.edu)
Fellow, IBBR; Adj. Assoc. Prof., UMCP; Research Biologist, NIST
IBBR, 9600 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD
tel: 240 314 6208; web: www.molevol.org