Hi Kevin
Sorry for the delay in responding. Been distracted with
submitted standards (a nice distraction).
The TAG should act as the ‘glue’ between the other TDWG
groups. Is the key issue therefore the vocabularies/ ontology?
I like the idea of a bunch of weasels. It would seem a good idea
for the TAG to disseminate a statement of intent as soon as your strategy crystallizes.
This would (hopefully) encourage the groups to aim in a productive direction.
I’m still working on recruiting members of the Programme
Committee. They should have a significant input to the meeting. They will be
the ones making a call to Conveners for group activities including involvement across
the themes.
Lee
Lee Belbin
TDWG Secretariat
From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org
[mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Richards
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2009 7:41 PM
To: Technical Architecture Group mailing list
Subject: [tdwg-tag] FW: TDWG in 2009
Hello fellow TAGers,
I
like the sound of Donald's mention of a "hackathon". If anyone
else is keen for such a thing at TDWG 2009, then let me know.
Some
ideas that we could work on:
-
Tapir tools, services, enhancements
-
LSID tools, services, enhancements
-
LSID vocabulary work - elaboration of the vocabs, tools for working with the
vocabs, ?
-
mash ups
-
semantic web integration with tdwg standards/tools
Also
had a few thoughts about how TAG ought to influence the the other sub groups
and their discussions.
A
snippet from an email to Doanld...
"I
do like the idea of concentrating more on the developing standards etc.
I
feel we will have to be careful though not to end up with different groups
heading different directions, or re-inventing wheels, because they are in
separate discussions/sub groups. One of the main concerns here is
subgroups creating models for data types that have been done elsewhere - ie the
"reuse" of existing schemas issue. I do have a cunning plan
though that may help (so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a
weasel :)). As this "reuse" issue is really a major concern of
the TAG group, we could have members of the TAG group spreading themselves
through the different discussion, making sure they are heading the same
direction as other groups and reusing models, etc, where appropriate. It
may help to have a short TAG "plan of attack" meeting before the main
meeting to work out strategies for this??"
Any
thoughts?
Kevin
From: tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org
[tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
[Donald.Hobern@csiro.au]
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2009 5:27 p.m.
To: tdwg@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: [tdwg] TDWG in 2009
Dear TDWG
Members and Friends,
TDWG 2009
will be help in Montpellier France from November 9-13. I thought I would take
this opportunity to outline the activities I see as important for TDWG this
year leading up to the conference this November. There are many important
things for us to be doing in the lead up to the meeting.
Consolidation
of past work
We have made
much progress over the last few years in reworking our standards for greater
interoperability. The LSID work and the associated LSID vocabularies have been
a major part of this. These changes make it much easier to reuse TDWG standards
with different technologies, to embed TDWG data elements in other structures,
and to map other data formats into forms which can be interpreted as
TDWG-compliant data. However this work is still incomplete. We need to
formalise the vocabularies as an agreed high-level ontology or data model to
support cross-project data integration. Many of our projects are awaiting a
clear lead in this area. Please contact me if you are interested in leading
some of this work or contributing to the discussion.
One obvious
example of the importance of this work comes from Annie Simpson's comments during
her presentation in Perth. It should not be difficult
for a group like GISIN to adopt TDWG standards
and be able quickly to build a network to share data using those standards. I
reiterate the challenge for us to solve this problem this year, using GISIN's
requirements as a benchmark.
It
is encouraging to see that NCD nears the end of its public review and that
TAPIR has just been submitted to the TDWG standards track. It would appear that
the submission of Darwin Core is not far off either. Please help to ensure that
we end up with effective standards that can be easily adopted by a wide
audience.
e-Biosphere
2009
The
e-Biosphere 2009 conference (http://www.e-biosphere09.org/)
will take place in London in June. This goals of this conference are to:
The main
meeting (1-3 June) has a programme of invited speakers who will provide an
overview of what is happening in biodiversity informatics and promote a
vision for the importance of this work. These sessions will address the
first and second of the goals above. At the end of the week, there will be a
smaller two-day workshop with representatives from a range of biodiversity
informatics projects discussing synergies and efficient collaboration (the
third goal).
e-Biosphere
is significant to TDWG for several reasons:
TDWG 2009
In recent years TDWG
conferences have moved away from their earlier format, with significant
emphasis on working group meetings, to become more of a reporting conference on
the activities of TDWG-related projects. This has had some benefits, but
has also in some ways weakened the organisation by reducing our focus on the
core activity of developing and promoting standards. The vitality of our
working groups in large measure depends on the conference providing a focus for
their activity.
For this reason, TDWG
2009 will be structured differently. Monday and Friday of the conference
have been reserved for plenary sessions, but for the rest of the conference we
plan to run three parallel (and, I hope, intersecting) streams of
activities. One of these will be on the use of biodiversity informatics
to support agriculture and crop diversity. Another stream will be for
TDWG to initiate activity in response to the roadmap developed at e-Biosphere
2009. The third stream is still be be selected. Each stream will
include a range of activities (e.g. symposia, seminars, task group sessions,
hackathons) planned to address key issues and to result in real deliverables to
progress biodiversity informatics in the area.
We are establishing a
Program Committee to plan the conference in detail and will keep you informed
of progress.
Best wishes,
Donald
|
Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living
Australia CSIRO Entomology, GPO Box 1700, Canberra,
ACT 2601 Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile:
0437990208 Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au |
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