[tdwg-tag] Ontology methods (was: Re: Embedding specimen (and other) annotations in NeXML)

[Hilmar Lapp]

I should maybe add that Barry Smith (one of the OBO Foundry PIs and  
lead author of the Nat Biotech paper) has suggested to us (us being  
several multi-species anatomy ontology development efforts, such as  
the Teleost Anatomy, Amphibian Anatomy, Spider Anatomy, and  
Hymenopteran Anatomy) several times to create a separate foundry for  
the domain of evolution as that would better foster community.

We haven't been overly excited about this yet, but broadening this  
scope to biodiversity and ecology and maybe embedding such a foundry  
within the TDWG infrastructure and organization could quite possibly  
make a compelling proposal.

	-hilmar

On Feb 23, 2009, at 5:27 PM, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> As far as I'm aware the group with the greatest experience in ontology
> building - admittedly a young field - is OBO Foundry. The organizers
> have thought hard about good practice and community process and have
> practical experience with what does and doesn't work. The group says
> they're about biomedical ontologies, but there's nothing about their
> practices that wouldn't work in taxonomy-related domains.
>
> http://www.obofoundry.org/about.shtml
> http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n11/full/nbt1346.html
>
> They are concerned with taxonomy, of course, but mostly as it relates
> to model organisms. Discussions about how to treat taxa have come up
> recently and I have told them they should look to the community that
> has fought these wars already...
>
> Personally I'd like to see a lot more cross-fertilization between
> taxonomy (biodiversity, collections, ...) and biomedical domains. For
> example, collections issues come up in contexts such as pathology and
> biological materials (plasmids etc.). Anatomy is probably another
> point of overlap. I'm not saying you should join, but I urge you to
> see if there's anything in what they do you might learn from - and
> vice versa.
>
> Best
> Jonathan Rees
> Science Commons
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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