Dear Fellow TAG Member,
The TAG mailing list has been quiet recently which may give the impression that there has been little action in terms of the new standards architecture. This is far from the truth. By its nature the TAG runs across almost all of the activities in TDWG and progress has been made in many separate areas that is contributing to the implementation of the overall vision as outlined in last years roadmap document:
http://www.tdwg.org/uploads/media/TAG_Roadmap_01.doc
This is a (possibly one off) news letter that summarizes some of the activities. Please shout out if I have missed anything or misrepresented anything.
Ontology and LSID Vocabularies.
An initial high level ontology for TDWG was presented at St Louis meeting. This is a useful overview of the TDWG domain across the existing schemas and standards.
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/TDWGOntology
Since that meeting the focus has been on developing application level classes within the ontology that can be used to define the metadata returned by LSID providers that are coming on line this year. These classes have been termed the LSID Vocabularies:
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/LsidVocs
The relationship between these 10 or so application level classes and the higher level ontology is being left somewhat vague at this point to allow the development of deployable systems now. Future changes in the ontology to more tightly integrate the LSID Vocabularies will be required to allow for inference across the data in the future but should not require significant changes of instance data (the deployed base) as the classes are insulated in their own namespaces.
The tool presented in St Louis to allow collaborative editing of the ontology has been abandoned in favor of the use of regular IDEs to produce RDF/OWL documents a Subversion repository. The need to port the ontology into many different technologies was not supported by further investigation but LSID Vocabularies will be presented in XML Schema so that they can be integrated with the TAPIR data providers - see below.
LSID Adoption
By the end of the year it is planned that LSID providers will include IPNI, Index Fungorum and ZooBank for TaxonName objects. Species2000/ Catalogue of Life annual checklist for TaxonConcepts, Herb IMI for Specimens. There will be a toolkit available for publishing Collections data in LSID Vocabulary format and issuing LSIDs for them. Many data sources will either be LSID enabled or in a position to deliver data as RDF based on the TDWG ontology - thanks to a combination of the TAPIR protocol/provider software and the LSID Vocabularies.
Progress with TAPIR protocol and providers.
The TAPIR protocol is now ready to enter the new TDWG standards track as Version 1 and two wrapper implementations are available -PyWrapper and TAPIRLink. It has been established (at a very successful TAPIR developers meeting in Copenhagen) that TAPIR will support delivery of RDF data based on the ontology. This mechanism is currently being refined through the use of avowed XML Schemas.
TAPIR providers are being rolled out in the USA and Europe this year and with them will go the ability to map to the ontology and exchange data in RDF.
A diagram summarizing the standards architecture is on the home page of the TAG Wiki
http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/WebHome
New charter for the new organisation structure.
TDWG was re-organized at the St Louis meeting. There is now a hierarchy of subgroups consisting of Interest Groups that contain Task Groups. All subgroups were asked to re-submit their charters and this has now been done for the TAG. The new charter is on the TAG Wiki home page. There are few changes from the previous charter.
There seems to be general agreement that the TAPIR subgroup and the GUID subgroup will become Task Groups within the TAG Interest Group but this can't happen until the executive have reviewed and accepted the TAG charter.
How about a meeting?
The dates have now been set for the TDWG 2007 meeting (16-23 September 2007 - Bratislava, Slovakia). By that date the TAG needs to put together a new Roadmap document describing the outlook for 2007/8. Funding may be available (from the TDWG Infrastructure Project) to hold a meeting of key individuals within the TAG at some point over the northern summer to help put that documents together. We would need to put a good case together to get it funded as we would be in competition with other groups. Whether or not we have a meeting I would like to hear opinions on how the TAG should be represented at the Bratislava meeting. Should we have a session within the main meeting? Should we have a pre-meeting?
Your input required
The TAG seems to be operating as a network of individuals rather than a single conversation. This is a good thing in that people don't have to spend a lot of time sifting through stuff that doesn't effect them. It is a bad thing in that it is easy for people to feel left out of the process.
If you would like to be more involved or think we should be looking at something we are not please let me know, bring it up on the mailing list or start a page on the wiki.
All the best for Easter and the coming Spring/Autumn depending on you hemisphere.
Roger
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Roger Hyam roger@tdwg.org Biodiversity Information Standards: http://www.tdwg.org/ ____________________________________________________________
TDWG Standards Architecture: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG LSID RDF Vocabularies: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/ LsidVocs ____________________________________________________________