[tdwg] EOL funds SPM work by Plazi

[Eamonn O Tuama]

Dear TDWG Members,

I am very pleased to announce the awarding of a contract to Dr Donat 
Agosti of Plazi (www.plazi.org) to undertake work on the Species Profile 
Model (SPM). With funding from Encyclopedia of Life (EOL - www.eol.org), 
Plazi will develop an SPM extension module as an addendum to their 2007 
GBIF Seed Money Award project entitled "Extracting Nomenclatural Data, 
Species Descriptions and Collecting Events from Legacy Publications: The 
Zootaxa-TaxonX-ZooBank Project" (GBIF Tracking Number 2007-94). The 
latter provides, as one of its outputs, biodiversity literature encoded 
as TaxonX XML documents through the use of the GoldenGate markup tool. 
The SPM extension will provide XSLT scripts for the creation of SPM 
documents expressed in RDF from the TaxonX documents. The RDF files will 
be mounted on the Plazi web server for harvesting by SPM aware agents, 
particularly those to be created by the EOL project. SPM data will be 
served through TAPIR.

This work will be done in close cooperation with GBIF and will engage 
the wider community through use of the SPM wiki site 
(http://wiki.tdwg.org/SPM) and mailing list 
(tdwg-spm-owner at lists.tdwg.org) hosted by TDWG. Other parties will be 
assisted in exposing species data contained in literature through 
documenting the process of using the freely accessible GoldenGate tools 
to provide SPM encoded data. The results of the project will also be 
presented in the SPM session at the TDWG 2008 conference.

If you are interested in participating in developments around SPM, 
please join the TDWG SPM maining list (tdwg-spm at lists.tdwg.org) and keep 
an eye on the SPM wiki (http://wiki.tdwg.org/SPM/).

Best regards,

Éamonn

-- 
Éamonn Ó Tuama, Ms.C., Ph.D. (eotuama at gbif.org), 
Senior Programme Officer - Inventory, Discover, Access (IDA), 
Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat, 
Universitetsparken 15, 
DK-2100, 
Copenhagen Ø, 
DENMARK

Phone:  +45 3532 1494; 
Fax:  	+45 3532 1480