For those of you on this list attending TDWG 2009 in Montpellier, today is the deadline for submitting preferences for the sessions.

I strongly encourage you to submit your preference to attend the SPM/Biological Description Interest group working sessions which are Sessions 6 and 7 on Tuesday. Gregor and I have planned back-to-back sessions as scope of standards like SPM and SDD range from general descriptive summaries to more atomized descriptions, and one of the things we need to do is discuss how best to ensure semantic connections across databases and schemas so that discovery and analysis can proceed intelligently, no matter what the scale of the original data.

In Session 6 we will have only two or three introductory talks to set the stage for discussion on a mechanism for proposing and approving new terms and relationships that takes advantage of the fact that SPM is an RDF-oriented standard. What I have in mind is taking advantage of GBIF's vocabulary server to extend SPM; we'd also take maximum advantage of this as we aggregate information on Encyclopedia of Life. The general idea is to promote inclusiveness in vocabulary while ensuring that SPM can help tie species-level descriptions together in machine readable ways. We'll also talk about refining some of the definitions of existing terms that have proven difficult in practice. I will send out some background material this week in preparation for this discussion.

Perhaps Gregor can comment on the goals for Session 7.

Cyndy

Cyndy