Dear all--
At the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) meeting last month, a sub-group of the phylogenetic standards working group started a project to assess "current best practices for publishing trees electronically". At present, probably the best way to publish a tree is to use the TreeBASE submission process, which makes it possible to upload a NEXUS file and create associations of OTUs with taxon IDs, and of data rows with accessions, and so on. But there are also some other possibilities. The preliminary report is being assembled here:
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Phylogenetics/LinkingTrees2010
Our plan is (over the next 6 weeks) to get feedback on this preliminary report, then analyze the results and prepare a more extensive report for publication.
One possibility that we haven't examined yet is to publish a tree electronically by rendering it in RDF in the language of CDAO (Comparative Data Analysis Ontology) and then contributing it to the Linked-Open-Data cloud in some way.
Does anyone out there want to explore this idea and contribute the results to the TDWG project? If so, please let me know.
Arlin ------- Arlin Stoltzfus (arlin@umd.edu) Fellow, IBBR; Adj. Assoc. Prof., UMCP; Research Biologist, NIST IBBR, 9600 Gudelsky Drive, Rockville, MD tel: 240 314 6208; web: www.molevol.org