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@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@tdwg.org.

Sincerely,

The 2017 TDWG Program Committee