Per some of your email with Neil Sarkar, there is quite a bit going on at OBO obo.sourceforge.net, including now the development of a Hymenoptera ontology spearheaded by Neil at the AMNH legacy literature digitization project that includes Neil, Norm Johnson, me, Donat Agosti, and Bryan Heidorn. OBO seems to be trying to broaden the meaning of the "B" beyond "biomedical". As far as I can tell, they focus on domain specific ontologies and not too much about ontology structure per se, so major intersection with TDWG may come in the future after the TDWG high level architecture is settled. Nevertheless, IMO it behooves TDWG to keep connected to their efforts. If people build applications against OBO ontologies it will be rather a problem if TDWG compliant applications can't also do so. This is unlikely to be a big problem, since, I think, OBO ontologies always have an OWL representation, and there are Protege plugins for the OBO file format.

The NSF funded Plant Ontology Consortium http://www.plantontology.org/index.html uses OBO principally. MoBot is a participant in the POC, so maybe someone from there could come to the TAG meeting and see what we are doing, and say what OBO is up to. Ideally that would be someone skilled in the subtleties of OBO, since it is possibly too early for TDWG to be talking about subject-specific ontologies.

Bob

Roger Hyam wrote:

Folks,

I have had positive responses from a few people off list about arranging a get together to discuss high level issues (or just to touch base) at St Louis so I will try and arrange something within the schedule.

Please let me know if there is anything you are particularly keen to include.

All the best,

Roger