Dear TDWG folk

The note below caught my interest in that I'm a taxonomist/plant systematist by vocation and am currently working in the area of ontology and controlled vocabulary development for monocots & dicots (this is an extension of the Gene Ontology paradigm - see: www.geneontology.org). Lest you're feeling hopeless about the lack of taxonomists represented in this area of endeavor (which overlaps I think with the I3C - I need to study it's mandate further), there is my voice along with those of several other biological ontologists who are collaborating with me. The relevance & inputs from taxonomy/systematics are already being realised amongst some of my colleagues - so there's hope. I'd argue that at least one taxonomist has already got his 'sleeves rolled up' (IMHO) & is working with other colleagues with similar goals (as being focused on by the I3C group). We're hoping to form the Plant Ontology Consortium to extend our tools, paradigm & 'influence', for the benefit of the users of plant-based databases.

Regards, - Leszek Vincent xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox P. Leszek D. Vincent Ph.D., FLS Plant Science Unit, Dept. of Agronomy, 209 Curtis Hall, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211-7020, USA. Ph: (573) 884-3716 (Agronomy), Fax:(573) 884-7850; Ph/Fax (Home): (573) 441-1228; Email: Leszek@missouri.edu Plant Systematist on the Maize Mapping Project - NSF award 9872655 - (http://www.cafnr.missouri.edu/mmp/ and http://www.agron.missouri.edu/) xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

-----Original Message----- From: Eric Zurcher [mailto:Eric.Zurcher@PI.CSIRO.AU] Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 9:45 PM To: TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG Subject: Announcement of the I3C (but where are the taxonomists?)

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This newsgroup might not be quite the correct forum for the

following, but

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as there has been no activity of late, I hope I will be forgiven.

At the end of June, the formation of the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C for short) was announced. So what is it? The I3C's own material states "The I3C's mission is to facilitate and enable data exchange, data management, and knowledge management across the entire life science community by promoting common protocols that ensures interoperability in an open, consistent and robust manner." The "common protocols" are largely XML based. See http://i3c.open-bio.org/ for details.

Unfortunately, the "entire life science community" does not, at least at this stage, appear to include taxonomists. The emphasis is strongly on genomics, with a substantial side interest in drug discovery. Nevertheless, this effort might be worth watching. It includes a number of heavyweights from the IT industry (IBM, Sun, Oracle), along with major players in pharmaceuticals and genomics, so there're a lot of resources to draw from. Whether their efforts might someday extend to include taxonomy, and whether taxonomists can learn from this initiative, remains to be seen. But that mission statement does sound remarkably like that of TDWG...

Eric Zurcher CSIRO Livestock Industries Canberra, ACT Australia E-mail: Eric.Zurcher@pi.csiro.au