[tdwg-tag] TAG meetings at St Louis

[Bob Morris]

Per some of your email with Neil Sarkar, there is quite a bit going on 
at OBO obo.sourceforge.net, including now the development of a 
Hymenoptera ontology spearheaded by Neil at the AMNH legacy literature 
digitization project that includes Neil, Norm Johnson, me, Donat Agosti, 
and Bryan Heidorn. OBO seems to be trying to broaden the meaning of the 
"B" beyond "biomedical". As far as I can tell, they focus on domain 
specific ontologies and not too much about ontology structure per se, so 
major intersection with TDWG may come in the future after the TDWG high 
level architecture is settled. Nevertheless, IMO it behooves TDWG to 
keep connected to their efforts. If people build applications against 
OBO ontologies it will be rather a problem if TDWG compliant 
applications can't also do so. This is unlikely to be a big problem, 
since, I think, OBO ontologies always have an OWL representation, and 
there are Protege plugins for the OBO file format.

The NSF funded Plant Ontology Consortium 
http://www.plantontology.org/index.html uses OBO principally. MoBot is a 
participant in the POC, so maybe someone from there could come to the 
TAG meeting and see what we are doing, and say what OBO is up to. 
Ideally that would be someone skilled in the subtleties of OBO, since it 
is possibly too early for TDWG to be talking about subject-specific 
ontologies.

Bob


Roger Hyam wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I have had positive responses from a few people off list about 
> arranging a get together to discuss high level issues (or just to 
> touch base) at St Louis so I will try and arrange something within the 
> schedule.
>
> Please let me know if there is anything you are particularly keen to 
> include.
>
> All the best,
>
> Roger
>

-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
ram at cs.umb.edu
http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466