January 2017 - tdwg-content

TDWG 2017 meeting announcement and call for symposia
by Stanley Blum 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

Dear TDWG list subscribers, (Please excuse our cross-posting.) We are excited to announce that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature will host the 2017 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Ottawa, Canada, Oct. 1 - Oct. 6. Below, we describe the conference and solicit proposals for workshops and symposia. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2017. A call for contributed papers and posters will be made in April 2017 after the symposia and workshops have been selected and announced. Standards for the description and exchange of biodiversity information help promote research, support decision-making for conservation and planning, and provide a means of communicating observations across taxa, sub-disciplines, and political boundaries. The annual TDWG conference serves two purposes: - it is a forum for developing, refining and extending standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and - it is a showcase for biodiversity informatics - much of which relies on the specifications provided by TDWG and other standards organizations. Our theme this year is "Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments". For more information on the conference, including links to accommodations, please visit https://tdwg.github.io/conferences/2017. We invite you to submit proposals for workshops and symposia, which can be organized around already established themes, or which can be used to explore emerging topics of interest. At TDWG, a symposium is typically a collection of talks, sometimes with a panel or open discussion; a workshop may have talks, but typically encourages more active engagement through training activities, or through facilitating consensus around a key issue. Symposia and workshops addressing the conference theme are encouraged, but other topics relating to biodiversity information management, integration, analysis, and standards are also welcomed, such as: - knowledge graphs - metagenomics - citizen science - semantics and ontologies (e.g., sampling, traits) - biological field station data management - collections - data visualization - data quality assessment and improvement - agricultural biodiversity - conservation informatics - illuminating dark data - phyloinformatics - ePublications - standards for image processing (e.g. computer vision for organismal identification) - wikis for biodiversity knowledge. For full consideration, please submit your proposal via email to conf-submissions(a)tdwg.org by 1 March 2017. Proposals should be fewer than 400 words, and should include the following: 1. Names, email addresses, and affiliations of all organizers. 2. Whether the proposal is for a workshop or a symposium. 3. Whether the organizer(s) will accept unsolicited abstract submissions (vs. inviting all speakers themselves). 4. Number of 90 minute sessions requested. Please note: As mentioned above, this is a call for workshop and symposium proposals only. The general call for contributed papers and posters will be announced in April 2017, after the symposia and workshops have been selected and announced. Please address questions to conference(a)tdwg.org. Sincerely, The 2017 TDWG Program Committee

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Tags to describe descriptions, keywords and frequency?
by Antonio Rojas Castro 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

Dear list, I am new to the Darwin Core World, so I apologize in advance if I am missing any basics. I am working on a project that aims to describe plants according to Haller. We are using DwC to encode information with XML; however, I am missing the following elements: - an element to store small descriptions of plants; - an element to store the place where plants may be found — by that I am not meaning the actual location where the plant was identified but its habitat in general terms. - an element to store the frequency of the plant, in other words, if it is common or not. I am currently using my own terms to store this information: <hllr:addition> <hllr:description>foliis subhirsutis, ovato lanceolatis, acute serratis, peiolis florigeris ramosis, folia superantibus.</hllr:description> <hllr:keyword>Wegränder</hllr:keyword> <hllr:keyword>Gebüsch</hllr:keyword> <hllr:keyword>felsig</hllr:keyword> <hllr:frequency>verbreitet</hllr:frequency> </hllr:addition> I am wondering whether I could store that information in DwC tags instead — or should I be using Dublin Core tags to describe this kind of information? Many thanks. Best, -- Dr. Antonio Rojas Castro Research assistant, Cologne Center for eHumanities Communication coordinator, EADH <http://www.antoniorojascastro.com>

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minor issues with DWCA Validator
by Matt Yoder 11 Jan '17

11 Jan '17

Hi there, As we implement a DWCA generator I've stumbled on a number of minor bits in reference to http://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/. I understand how to get around these things, but resolving them might lower the barrier to entry for others. When I validate a DWCA 1) then I see a link 'Dublin Core' (http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/source/browse/trunk/dwca-reader/src/tes…) that link is broken 2) and I have no metadata file then the instructions under Metadata as to what to do to resolve the problem (i.e. do next) are essentially unusable for the non-technically oriented 3) and I read this: "All null values are empty strings." in green and I get this immediately after "Error scanning records: java.lang.NullPointerException" then I am confused I would be less confused with a literal example of the issue 4) and I have an id column in [0], and that id column is mapped to nothing then I see under Darwin Core Occurrence 'Core Record ID mapped to nothing' and I think 'OK' then at the bottom of that list I see 'Unknown term http://purl.org/dc/terms/identifier mapped to column 0' and I am confused as to this (auto-mapping?) that has a namespace (http://purl.org/dc/terms/) and a term (identifier), both of which I have not referenced and I don't know what todo Cheers, Matt

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