Yes - the program is still in flux, but it looks like we'll have two sessions, and that we won't overlap with the new DwC/OGC group convened by John Deck, Phylogenetics, Invasive Species, TAG, Multimedia Resources, or Observations.

Joel.

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Kevin Richards wrote:

Good to see this moving along Joel.

I assume you have requested/lined up a time/session at the TDWG meeting for this new task group?

Kevin

-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of joel sachs Sent: Tuesday, 20 September 2011 7:47 a.m. To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-tag] RDF/OWL Good Practices Task Group

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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Ben,

It's a shame you won't be able to attend. Please share the questions that you have here: http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/Questions

Anyone else with specific (or general) questions that they've been saving up are also invited to contribute them. These questions will help us to craft the agenda for the kickoff meeting and subsequent discussion and document writing.

Thanks, Joel.

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Richardson, Ben wrote:

Joel,

This is great. I'd been wanting to ask a set of questions around this very subject. My travel request was refused, but I'll tune in as much as I can from here.

Cheers, Ben

-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of joel sachs Sent: Tuesday, 20 September 2011 3:47 To: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-tag] RDF/OWL Good Practices Task Group

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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For most purposes, all that is really wanted is a set of agreed-on records and fields - a record being a bundle of fields: some required, some multivalued and so on. Yes, you might want to lay OWL reasoning rules over these, but what is really needed in the first instance is "country code" and "habitat type".

I occurs to me that LDAP is an ideal model of these types of requirements.

* An LDAP directory data schema declares a number of attributes. Each attribute has a data type and may or may not be multi-valued. * Data types include strings, numbers, strings fitting a formatting pattern, addresses and phone numbers, and of course "pointer to LDAP object of type X". * The directory schema also declares a number of record types. Each record type is a bundle of attributes, each of which might be required or optional. * Records may multiply inherit their attribute bundles from other records, in which case the attribute bundle is simply the union. * Crucially, an attribute named "phone number" always means the same thing in any record in which it appears. The name of the attribute belongs to the attribute, not the record. * Finally, an object has attributes with values. One of the attributes is "record type" (which is multivalued) and the LDAP store enforces data integrity.

It's obvious, I think, how well this maps to the RDF/OWL/triples way of looking at the world. I'm pretty sure LDAP servers do things like data federation and distributed data. LDAP servers are usually oriented towards fast lookup and retrieval. Even if the data objects are not stored in an LDAP dart store, something like open ldap might serve as a worthwhile platform for hosting vocabularies. URIs for vocabulary terms might be made available as equivalent ldap:// and http:// forms. Implement a JENA graph that queries an LDAP data source, use it as a JOSEKI back-end, and you are done.

From the point of view of our immediate problem - somehow making it possible for people to collaborate on authoring RDF vocabularies - there are existing tools for managing and editing schemas in an LDAP store. These types of tools understand users and user groups, access restrictions, the whole thorny issue of providing a secure public interface.

There are a variety of things that don't "fit" naturally into an LDAP schema, of course - reasoning rules especially. But those things can be dispensed with for purposes of hosting vocabularies. It might very well be that because the LDAP model is so similar to what is needed (attributes and types), that using these tools will be natural for the job at hand.

On 20/09/2011, at 6:14 PM, Dag Endresen (GBIF) wrote:

Dear Joel and Steve,

I am very interested to take part in the RDF/OWL task group kickoff meeting at TDWG 2011 in New Orleans!

I have recently started as the new Knowledge Systems Engineer at the GBIF secretariat in Copenhagen. I plan to focus in the first phase on providing tools for collecting terminology and the definition of concepts in use in the biodiversity informatics domain. This will hopefully lead to the mapping of terms in these vocabularies and the development of ontologies to describe the relation and different use of these terms in different parts of our community.

GBIF provides the http://vocabularies.gbif.org as a tool to collect and discuss vocabularies. This tool was developed at GBIF and the Natural History Museum in London using the Scratchpads and Drupal. I am exploring other supplementary tools such as the Web Protege for collaborative development of domain vocabularies and ontologies. I am also exploring solutions such as the NCBO BioPortal for publishing agreed-upon versions of our vocabularies and ontologies. I would much appreciate feedback and discussions to identify the requirements, priorities and solutions for this task.

My personal background is from the community of plant genetic resources for agriculture where I have taken an active part in the genebank domain modeling during the last 10 years.

With best regards Dag Endresen

On Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:46:44 -0400 (EDT), joel sachs wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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Hi Hilmar,

I added you as an owner, and will add other core members as owners or commiters, so that everyone can edit. Non-group members can leave comments, which can be incorporated into the page as appropriate.

I share your concern about nothing happening after the meeting, and agree that a publishing goal would be a good incentive. Also, if we create the "sandbox" that we talked about at iEVoBio (and which Rod Page is essentially challenging us to build), we may be able to support several small workshop publications, as group members experiment with a variety of approaches.

By all means, let's look at modeling, and possibly building on the existing biomedical manuscript.

Joel.

On Tue, 20 Sep 2011, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

Hi Joel,

how can I edit the charter? I don't seem to be able to. Also, to provide an incentive to prevent what typically happens after such meetings (namely nothing further), one idea could be our goal to produce a manuscript for publication, e.g. in Biodiversity Informatics, that articulates motivations and conclusions for whatever recommendations emerge as consensus, as well as those for which controversy remains.

FYI, there is currently a manuscript in pre-publication status that looks at best practices for publishing RDF on the scope of life science data, but with a focus on biomedical and drug data. We may be able to look at this as a basis, and one possibility would be to build on it and cast its findings, plus our own, in terms of the needs of biodiversity data publishers and consumers.

-hilmar

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

---

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--

: Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :

Hilmar, I've been in class all afternoon so I haven't had time to look carefully at your edits yet. But I wanted to make one comment about what you said in your second paragraph. It is part of the nature of a task group that it have a limited lifespan: the amount of time that it takes to complete the task which it has been assigned. After that, the job of maintaining the standard which the task group creates reverts to the interest group which chartered it (I am paraphrasing here from my understanding of http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/). So if the RDF group is actually a Task Group chartered by the TAG, then after its task is completed, it will fall to the TAG to maintain the product that it creates.

The concerns that you raise below include some of the reasons why we had initially suggested that the group be an Interest Group rather than a Task Group. An interest group does not have a defined lifespan - it exists as long as the interest exists. Unlike a Task Group, it does not have to produce a defined product which http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/ implies (but does not explicitly state) would be a standard of one of the flavors described in http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/ (Technical Specification, Applicability Statement, Best Current Practice, or Data Standard).

The reason why we are currently proposing that the group be a Task Group is primarily because several members of the TAG felt that was the most appropriate thing. I think that I agree with them. However, I am still uneasy about several aspects of chartering the group as a Task Group, namely: 1. I don't really understand exactly who the TAG is (i.e. specifically, who are the particular people to whom the RDF TG would be accountable?). 2. What precisely is the task whose completion will signal the end of the life of the Task Group? We have put some benchmarks in the charter, but none of them include the creation of a standard of any of the forms I listed above. Is that OK for a Task Group? I don't know.

I certainly don't want to put a damper on the forward progress of the group by asking these questions, because I'm excited about the prospect of getting the group off the ground and because the TDWG meeting is only weeks away. But at the moment we are engaging in a discussion within the chartering group and I think it would be appropriate for some of the TAG members to weigh in on these concerns. If it turns out that there isn't really any answer to the question "who exactly is the TAG?" and "what is our task?" then maybe chartering an Interest Group would be more appropriate than a Task Group.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

Joel -

I've made a number of edits. These are in part to put the motivation into a larger beyond-TDWG context, and in part to make it a little more future-proof. The charter in places read (to me) more like a workshop agenda than a charter, thus preempting decisions that the TG participants might (want to) make to a degree that I wasn't fully comfortable with. I've tried to make it take a step back.

I also removed the sentence about handing off to the TAG after one year - while that may be what the participants indeed decide to do after one year, it's not what I'd want ingrained in the charter, and also a one-off mindset isn't necessarily what I'd like to start with. More to the point, if the TG (or whatever its successor(s)) doesn't maintain those documents, I'm afraid nobody will, and there is plenty of empirical evidence around the TDWG site to support that.

-hilmar

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

---

tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag

Hi Steve -

Bob suggested too that I changed the charter into an Interest Group charter. So I'm sorry if rather than moving anything forward I created mostly confusion.

Having said that, the changes I made are a reflection of the context and scope of charge in which I think this group, whether it is now an IG or TG, should be operating, i.e., that I feel would make the most sense. I feel pretty strongly that producing and practically validating RDF/OWL data publishing and consumption practices will consist of more than one task, and the idea that this is a task we can do once and for all is rather concerning to me. In fact, IMHO it isn't even worth attempting - the technology landscape in this area is evolving so rapidly, anything we produce now is virtually guaranteed to be obsolete in one year if no group feels committed to maintain it.

I'll also admit that I'm actually surprised to find that the TAG is an IG similar to all others. I would think the TAG ought to be a cross- cutting group that integrates the output from all IGs, and has no TGs of its own other than those devoted to accomplishing this cross-IG integration.

Finally, if TGs are devoted to accomplishing one task and then they dissolve, I don't understand why anyone should be bothered with creating, and then approving a charter to start with - shouldn't they rather have an agenda (or possibly a proposal preceding that)? Either there are people willing to do the task or there are not - I don't see the point of the chartering/approval process here.

So, apparently the TDWG process just confuses the hell out of me. And apparently it's really only an IG that would be in line with what I think is the most useful way to do this. Can we still change to IG?

-hilmar

On Sep 23, 2011, at 5:03 PM, Steve Baskauf wrote:

Hilmar, I've been in class all afternoon so I haven't had time to look carefully at your edits yet. But I wanted to make one comment about what you said in your second paragraph. It is part of the nature of a task group that it have a limited lifespan: the amount of time that it takes to complete the task which it has been assigned. After that, the job of maintaining the standard which the task group creates reverts to the interest group which chartered it (I am paraphrasing here from my understanding of http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/) . So if the RDF group is actually a Task Group chartered by the TAG, then after its task is completed, it will fall to the TAG to maintain the product that it creates.

The concerns that you raise below include some of the reasons why we had initially suggested that the group be an Interest Group rather than a Task Group. An interest group does not have a defined lifespan - it exists as long as the interest exists. Unlike a Task Group, it does not have to produce a defined product which http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/ implies (but does not explicitly state) would be a standard of one of the flavors described in http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/ (Technical Specification, Applicability Statement, Best Current Practice, or Data Standard).

The reason why we are currently proposing that the group be a Task Group is primarily because several members of the TAG felt that was the most appropriate thing. I think that I agree with them. However, I am still uneasy about several aspects of chartering the group as a Task Group, namely:

1. I don't really understand exactly who the TAG is (i.e.

specifically, who are the particular people to whom the RDF TG would be accountable?). 2. What precisely is the task whose completion will signal the end of the life of the Task Group? We have put some benchmarks in the charter, but none of them include the creation of a standard of any of the forms I listed above. Is that OK for a Task Group? I don't know.

I certainly don't want to put a damper on the forward progress of the group by asking these questions, because I'm excited about the prospect of getting the group off the ground and because the TDWG meeting is only weeks away. But at the moment we are engaging in a discussion within the chartering group and I think it would be appropriate for some of the TAG members to weigh in on these concerns. If it turns out that there isn't really any answer to the question "who exactly is the TAG?" and "what is our task?" then maybe chartering an Interest Group would be more appropriate than a Task Group.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

...

Joel -

I've made a number of edits. These are in part to put the motivation into a larger beyond-TDWG context, and in part to make it a little more future-proof. The charter in places read (to me) more like a workshop agenda than a charter, thus preempting decisions that the TG participants might (want to) make to a degree that I wasn't fully comfortable with. I've tried to make it take a step back.

I also removed the sentence about handing off to the TAG after one year - while that may be what the participants indeed decide to do after one year, it's not what I'd want ingrained in the charter, and also a one-off mindset isn't necessarily what I'd like to start with. More to the point, if the TG (or whatever its successor(s)) doesn't maintain those documents, I'm afraid nobody will, and there is plenty of empirical evidence around the TDWG site to support that.

-hilmar

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

---

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-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.

delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235

office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu

Fair enough Bob. I just stated my opinions :-)

-hilmar

On Sep 23, 2011, at 6:53 PM, Bob Morris wrote:

You'll still have to have tasks, task groups, and TG charters. I don't think you gain anything by proliferating IGs. It looks to me that the outputs desired are outputs about the TDWG technical architecture. The TAG charter is pretty unambiguous that these admirable outcomes are part of its remit. As you remark, there either are or aren't people interested in maintaining these outcomes. Those people can join the TAG or they can join the newly named IG. What difference will there be in the workflow if it is a new IG or TAG? I also don't think the TDWG constitution forbids renewable TGs. But even if it does, an annually chartered TG whose charter is essentially "we will review best practices document X and bring it up to date." is probably low overhead and quickly approved by the IG. If you can't find a group to do that, then you can't find it whether you have a disinterested interest group, or a disinterested task group.

Bob

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Hilmar Lapp hlapp@nescent.org wrote:

...

Hi Steve - Bob suggested too that I changed the charter into an Interest Group charter. So I'm sorry if rather than moving anything forward I created mostly confusion. Having said that, the changes I made are a reflection of the context and scope of charge in which I think this group, whether it is now an IG or TG, should be operating, i.e., that I feel would make the most sense. I feel pretty strongly that producing and practically validating RDF/OWL data publishing and consumption practices will consist of more than one task, and the idea that this is a task we can do once and for all is rather concerning to me. In fact, IMHO it isn't even worth attempting - the technology landscape in this area is evolving so rapidly, anything we produce now is virtually guaranteed to be obsolete in one year if no group feels committed to maintain it. I'll also admit that I'm actually surprised to find that the TAG is an IG similar to all others. I would think the TAG ought to be a cross- cutting group that integrates the output from all IGs, and has no TGs of its own other than those devoted to accomplishing this cross-IG integration. Finally, if TGs are devoted to accomplishing one task and then they dissolve, I don't understand why anyone should be bothered with creating, and then approving a charter to start with - shouldn't they rather have an agenda (or possibly a proposal preceding that)? Either there are people willing to do the task or there are not - I don't see the point of the chartering/approval process here. So, apparently the TDWG process just confuses the hell out of me. And apparently it's really only an IG that would be in line with what I think is the most useful way to do this. Can we still change to IG? -hilmar

On Sep 23, 2011, at 5:03 PM, Steve Baskauf wrote:

Hilmar, I've been in class all afternoon so I haven't had time to look carefully at your edits yet. But I wanted to make one comment about what you said in your second paragraph. It is part of the nature of a task group that it have a limited lifespan: the amount of time that it takes to complete the task which it has been assigned. After that, the job of maintaining the standard which the task group creates reverts to the interest group which chartered it (I am paraphrasing here from my understanding of http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/). So if the RDF group is actually a Task Group chartered by the TAG, then after its task is completed, it will fall to the TAG to maintain the product that it creates.

The concerns that you raise below include some of the reasons why we had initially suggested that the group be an Interest Group rather than a Task Group. An interest group does not have a defined lifespan - it exists as long as the interest exists. Unlike a Task Group, it does not have to produce a defined product which http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/ implies (but does not explicitly state) would be a standard of one of the flavors described in http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/ (Technical Specification, Applicability Statement, Best Current Practice, or Data Standard).

The reason why we are currently proposing that the group be a Task Group is primarily because several members of the TAG felt that was the most appropriate thing. I think that I agree with them. However, I am still uneasy about several aspects of chartering the group as a Task Group, namely:

1. I don't really understand exactly who the TAG is (i.e.

specifically, who are the particular people to whom the RDF TG would be accountable?). 2. What precisely is the task whose completion will signal the end of the life of the Task Group? We have put some benchmarks in the charter, but none of them include the creation of a standard of any of the forms I listed above. Is that OK for a Task Group? I don't know.

I certainly don't want to put a damper on the forward progress of the group by asking these questions, because I'm excited about the prospect of getting the group off the ground and because the TDWG meeting is only weeks away. But at the moment we are engaging in a discussion within the chartering group and I think it would be appropriate for some of the TAG members to weigh in on these concerns. If it turns out that there isn't really any answer to the question "who exactly is the TAG?" and "what is our task?" then maybe chartering an Interest Group would be more appropriate than a Task Group.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

Joel -

I've made a number of edits. These are in part to put the motivation into a larger beyond-TDWG context, and in part to make it a little more future-proof. The charter in places read (to me) more like a workshop agenda than a charter, thus preempting decisions that the TG participants might (want to) make to a degree that I wasn't fully comfortable with. I've tried to make it take a step back.

I also removed the sentence about handing off to the TAG after one year - while that may be what the participants indeed decide to do after one year, it's not what I'd want ingrained in the charter, and also a one-off mindset isn't necessarily what I'd like to start with. More to the point, if the TG (or whatever its successor(s)) doesn't maintain those documents, I'm afraid nobody will, and there is plenty of empirical evidence around the TDWG site to support that.

-hilmar

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.

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-- Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 IT Staff Filtered Push Project Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Harvard University

email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)

The various responses are reassuring me that an RDF TG chartered (and potentially rechartered) by the TAG would be fine as long as the goals that are listed in the charter are an adequate "task" for the group.

Bob Morris wrote:

The membership is listed on the Members link at http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tag/, which is generically the place to find the answer to 1. That said, a number(?) of IG's still have huge membership probably with no interest but getting notices of activity of the IG, because until tdwg-content was born, each IG kept its own mailing list. Probably in practice the Core Members of an IG are the ones that would bear the brunt of keeping Task outputs current, or

I was afraid that this was going to be the answer. This means the TAG has 167 members (including me since I'm on the email list, what a surprise!). My browser won't let me look at the names beyond the first 50 people, so I can't actually see who all of the members are. But out of that first 50, I only see the names of a few people whom I recognize as people who seem to actively be involved in the work of TDWG (at least based on who is making posts to the tdwg-content list). So I would guess that many of those people fall into the category of people who just wanted to get "notices of activity" as Bob put it. Given my newly-discovered power as a "member of the TAG" (whoa, does that make me a member of the famed TDWG Illuminati - especially since my name can't be seen on the list?!), I will exercise it by making a suggestion. How about setting up a webpage (it could be something like Google Code or Google Groups if the TDWG website doesn't work, which often seems to be the case) where people can sign up/volunteer to be members of the TAG for a year. Each year, the members would have to renew their membership or they get dropped from the list. That would provide a real list of people who are currently serious about technical architecture issues. The email list could stay as it is. Similarly, this page could have an updated list of the Core members. I don't think that the list on the charter (http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tag/charter/) is up to date since it lists Roger Hyam as the Convener, but the group page, http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tag/ (correctly) says that Greg Whitbread is the Convener. In addition to possibly making the TAG a more functional group (e.g. how does the TAG have a "vote" when we have no idea how many of the 167 members are actually serious participants?), it would also go a long way towards getting rid of this idea that there is a secret group in TDWG that wields power behind the scene.

On second thought, let's not make that a suggestion. I'm making it an actual proposal.

Steve

Blum, Stan wrote:

Bob is right -- interest groups and task groups run as long as there is interest AND no one moves (actively) to terminate the group. So even if interest/activity trails off, the group still exists "on the books" to embarrass us and make us feel guilty.

We have several groups that need to be revitalized, so to speak. And we have a few that might need to be re-factored. DarwinCore now overlaps Observations, Taxonomic Names and Concepts, possibly this new RDF group, etc. But those are OPP -- other people's problems -- for the moment.

But Hilmar is also right that TAG is more than a normal IG. It has a review and advice role, in service to the executive and all the other interest groups.

In response to Hilmar's question, why should a task group have a charter? : to communicate the group's function to anyone not directly involved. The approval is primarily to ensure that the communication is happening.

BTW, I don't have strong feelings about whether this group should be a task group in TAG, or an independent Interest Group. Focus on the work, not the classification.

-Stan

On 9/23/11 3:53 PM, "Bob Morris" morris.bob@gmail.com wrote:

...

You'll still have to have tasks, task groups, and TG charters. I don't think you gain anything by proliferating IGs. It looks to me that the outputs desired are outputs about the TDWG technical architecture. The TAG charter is pretty unambiguous that these admirable outcomes are part of its remit. As you remark, there either are or aren't people interested in maintaining these outcomes. Those people can join the TAG or they can join the newly named IG. What difference will there be in the workflow if it is a new IG or TAG? I also don't think the TDWG constitution forbids renewable TGs. But even if it does, an annually chartered TG whose charter is essentially "we will review best practices document X and bring it up to date." is probably low overhead and quickly approved by the IG. If you can't find a group to do that, then you can't find it whether you have a disinterested interest group, or a disinterested task group.

Bob

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Hilmar Lapp hlapp@nescent.org wrote:

...

Hi Steve - Bob suggested too that I changed the charter into an Interest Group charter. So I'm sorry if rather than moving anything forward I created mostly confusion. Having said that, the changes I made are a reflection of the context and scope of charge in which I think this group, whether it is now an IG or TG, should be operating, i.e., that I feel would make the most sense. I feel pretty strongly that producing and practically validating RDF/OWL data publishing and consumption practices will consist of more than one task, and the idea that this is a task we can do once and for all is rather concerning to me. In fact, IMHO it isn't even worth attempting - the technology landscape in this area is evolving so rapidly, anything we produce now is virtually guaranteed to be obsolete in one year if no group feels committed to maintain it. I'll also admit that I'm actually surprised to find that the TAG is an IG similar to all others. I would think the TAG ought to be a cross-cutting group that integrates the output from all IGs, and has no TGs of its own other than those devoted to accomplishing this cross-IG integration. Finally, if TGs are devoted to accomplishing one task and then they dissolve, I don't understand why anyone should be bothered with creating, and then approving a charter to start with - shouldn't they rather have an agenda (or possibly a proposal preceding that)? Either there are people willing to do the task or there are not - I don't see the point of the chartering/approval process here. So, apparently the TDWG process just confuses the hell out of me. And apparently it's really only an IG that would be in line with what I think is the most useful way to do this. Can we still change to IG? -hilmar

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.

Hi Steve,

I'm mostly in agreement with you, in that I understand your "first floor" (or perhaps more aptly named ground floor) as defining the domain data model, and the second floor as communicating data that instantiate the domain model.

I guess my two principle concerns, where I think it should be left to the participants and not the charter to put their foot down, can be summed up as follows. I think the value propositions of RDF/OWL isn't in enabling us to publish our biodiversity data, compared to what we can do already without RDF/OWL. Therefore, the domain model we want to instantiate in RDF or OWL should as much, if not entirely, be driven by what we want to do with the instance data, rather than by unrealistic expectations of replacing current data publishing and exchange standards with an RDF representation. In that, I'm much with Joel's earlier stressing the "schema last" power of RDF - we can add properties later to the instance data if and when we need them to accomplish something, all we need in the first floor are the weight-carrying walls and a staircase to the 2nd floor, and the pipes and electrical lines we can add when and where we'll need them for the higher floors in your picture. The potential of publishing data in RDF is, IMHO, really in enabling reuse of the data that would not be easily obtainable with the ways we publish data currently. By and large, this will be integrative and aggegrating reuse applications - ones that are seriously hampered by data that, albeit available online, are in silos.

So I think it would be a mistake and missed opportunity if the group started with debating at length the RDF domain model for the sake of getting the domain model "right".

-hilmar

Sent with a tap.

On Sep 25, 2011, at 2:28 PM, Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:

Hilmar, I've had time to look over the revisions that you made to the charter. I think that the changes you made were useful for clarifying the issues faced by the group and have improved the document - thanks for that. The only change that I have questions about is one between r45 and r46, showing up as line 42 in the source comparison. (It's possible that this may be viewable at this URL: http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/source/diff?path=/wiki/CharterOfTG.wiki&am...). In that revision, you removed the section about "meeting the needs for standardized data exchange". My concern to some extent reflects Donald Hobern's comments at: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-tag/2011-September/002396.html namely that RDF can play an important role as a data-transfer technology.

In my somewhat simplistic view, the problem the RDF group faces is something like constructing a building with four floors. (My apologies in advance for oversimplification and errors in use of terms.) Building the bottom floor involves coming to a consensus about kinds of things we need to talk about in the biodiversity informatics world and their basic properties. (This would involve examining existing vocabularies and ontologies within and outside of TDWG and choosing, and if necessary creating classes for the resources which are of interest to our constituency and at least suggesting some of the critical datatype properties [sensu OWL; http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#Restriction] for those classes.) The second floor involves figuring out how we communicate information about these things and the relationships among them. (This would be working out the object properties [sensu OWL] that describe the relationships among classes and working out the practical details of how users at one institution can make use of information provided by or housed at another.) The third floor involves aggregating information and preforming queries on the aggregated data. (This would be figuring out how to make it possible to create triple stores and query them with SPARQL; roughly the goals of Linked Data). The topmost floor would involve doing more sophisticated reasoning and making discoveries by drawing inferences about the things we have discovered (roughly the goals of the Semantic Web). It seems to me like we are asking for trouble if we start building the upper floors without constructing the lower ones first. We need something to support the upper floors! It also seems like we would also be asking for trouble if we start building the bottom floor without putting some thought in what we plan for the upper floors to look like.

So my concern about the change is that we don't remove the first and second floors from the RDF/OWL building. The core member list of the proposed group is well populated with people who are comfortable with living in floors three and four. But floors one through three are really the most directly related to the core mission of TDWG (see http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/). So I feel strongly that they deserve a lot of attention, at least in the early part of the TG's work.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

...

Hi Steve -

Bob suggested too that I changed the charter into an Interest Group charter. So I'm sorry if rather than moving anything forward I created mostly confusion.

Having said that, the changes I made are a reflection of the context and scope of charge in which I think this group, whether it is now an IG or TG, should be operating, i.e., that I feel would make the most sense. I feel pretty strongly that producing and practically validating RDF/OWL data publishing and consumption practices will consist of more than one task, and the idea that this is a task we can do once and for all is rather concerning to me. In fact, IMHO it isn't even worth attempting - the technology landscape in this area is evolving so rapidly, anything we produce now is virtually guaranteed to be obsolete in one year if no group feels committed to maintain it.

I'll also admit that I'm actually surprised to find that the TAG is an IG similar to all others. I would think the TAG ought to be a cross-cutting group that integrates the output from all IGs, and has no TGs of its own other than those devoted to accomplishing this cross-IG integration.

Finally, if TGs are devoted to accomplishing one task and then they dissolve, I don't understand why anyone should be bothered with creating, and then approving a charter to start with - shouldn't they rather have an agenda (or possibly a proposal preceding that)? Either there are people willing to do the task or there are not - I don't see the point of the chartering/approval process here.

So, apparently the TDWG process just confuses the hell out of me. And apparently it's really only an IG that would be in line with what I think is the most useful way to do this. Can we still change to IG?

-hilmar

On Sep 23, 2011, at 5:03 PM, Steve Baskauf wrote:

...

Hilmar, I've been in class all afternoon so I haven't had time to look carefully at your edits yet. But I wanted to make one comment about what you said in your second paragraph. It is part of the nature of a task group that it have a limited lifespan: the amount of time that it takes to complete the task which it has been assigned. After that, the job of maintaining the standard which the task group creates reverts to the interest group which chartered it (I am paraphrasing here from my understanding of http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/). So if the RDF group is actually a Task Group chartered by the TAG, then after its task is completed, it will fall to the TAG to maintain the product that it creates.

The concerns that you raise below include some of the reasons why we had initially suggested that the group be an Interest Group rather than a Task Group. An interest group does not have a defined lifespan - it exists as long as the interest exists. Unlike a Task Group, it does not have to produce a defined product which http://www.tdwg.org/about-tdwg/process/ implies (but does not explicitly state) would be a standard of one of the flavors described in http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/ (Technical Specification, Applicability Statement, Best Current Practice, or Data Standard).

The reason why we are currently proposing that the group be a Task Group is primarily because several members of the TAG felt that was the most appropriate thing. I think that I agree with them. However, I am still uneasy about several aspects of chartering the group as a Task Group, namely:

1. I don't really understand exactly who the TAG is (i.e. specifically, who are the particular people to whom the RDF TG would be accountable?).
2. What precisely is the task whose completion will signal the end of the life of the Task Group? We have put some benchmarks in the charter, but none of them include the creation of a standard of any of the forms I listed above. Is that OK for a Task Group? I don't know.

I certainly don't want to put a damper on the forward progress of the group by asking these questions, because I'm excited about the prospect of getting the group off the ground and because the TDWG meeting is only weeks away. But at the moment we are engaging in a discussion within the chartering group and I think it would be appropriate for some of the TAG members to weigh in on these concerns. If it turns out that there isn't really any answer to the question "who exactly is the TAG?" and "what is our task?" then maybe chartering an Interest Group would be more appropriate than a Task Group.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

...

Joel -

I've made a number of edits. These are in part to put the motivation into a larger beyond-TDWG context, and in part to make it a little more future-proof. The charter in places read (to me) more like a workshop agenda than a charter, thus preempting decisions that the TG participants might (want to) make to a degree that I wasn't fully comfortable with. I've tried to make it take a step back.

I also removed the sentence about handing off to the TAG after one year - while that may be what the participants indeed decide to do after one year, it's not what I'd want ingrained in the charter, and also a one-off mindset isn't necessarily what I'd like to start with. More to the point, if the TG (or whatever its successor(s)) doesn't maintain those documents, I'm afraid nobody will, and there is plenty of empirical evidence around the TDWG site to support that.

-hilmar

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:46 PM, joel sachs wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.

delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235

office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu

--

: Hilmar Lapp -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :

-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.

delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235

office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu

Pete, I had promised myself that I was not going to say anything more on this subject but in the spirit of Hilmar's reply I will say one more thing. I believe that the fact that an RDF task group is even getting off the ground is due in a large part to your repeated efforts to educate the TDWG community on the potential of RDF/LinkedData and your examples of what can be done and how to do it. I have made it no secret that I started out completely clueless about the subject and that much of what I've learned was from a combination of your posts, your help to me directly, and your examples. In fact, when I want to know how to do something, the first place I go to look for examples is usually taxonconcept.org and as a consequence I've tried to cite and reference your work whenever possible. With the creation of a task group, TDWG is now officially and seriously looking at RDF/Linked Data/Semantic Web as a tool. I thought that was exactly what you've been wanting for years and why you expended so much effort toward creating your examples. That's why I'm so puzzled that you are upset that this group is starting up.

Steve

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

Pete -

let me just steal a quote from the numerous people who must have stated this before in some form or another: When you set something free, it's free. It is no longer yours to control.

While I think most or all of us understand this very well for open-source and certainly for public-domain software source code, this is as true for publishing (freeing) data, and certainly as much for freeing knowledge and ideas. If you put an idea out on a public discussion forum, you've set your idea free. You've set it free for others to reuse in whatever form they see fit. That's the power of openness in advancing science, whether by open-sourcing code, publishing data under CC0, or posting ideas on blogs (let alone mailing lists).

If you don't want your ideas reused, or can only tolerate certain kinds of reuses but not others, then keep them to yourself. In my mind, open groups such as mailing lists, and the TDWG interest groups for that matter, are for merciless reuse, within the confines of common professional ethics. There is nothing unethical, in my mind, if someone were stimulated or persuaded by your efforts to change their mind on something, even if to the extent that they now vigorously argue that new standpoint as their own. What could be more convincing about the merits of the efforts that led to that. If that's something you can say you've accomplished within TDWG, I'd be very proud of it; it's certainly much more than I ever have.

We all know the saying of plagiarism being the sincerest form of flattery. In that sense, if I ever got someone in TDWG to copy an idea of mine and reproduce it as their own, it'd be one of my proudest moments (unless, of course, it were one of my numerous bad ideas). This isn't about you or me or us, Pete - at least as far as I'm concerned the reason I'm in here is to advance our knowledge of biodiversity so that in the end this world becomes a better place. If in order to get there it takes someone else copying my idea as theirs, that's fine - it won't dampen my energy for a second.

And no, I won't say anything further on this matter - to me, it's just really a huge distraction from what we, including you, Pete, can really contribute to the group.

-hilmar

On Sep 28, 2011, at 5:11 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:

...

Hi TDWG'ers,

I thought it would be good to explain in a different way how I see TDWG functioning.

There are people who take pride in their intellect.

If it turns out that they are wrong they can experience a form of cognitive dissonance.

The either consciously or unconsciously convince themselves that the original person taking the "correct side" was wrong, or that they had actually heard it somewhere else (they were never on the "wrong" side)

In some cases, they are aware of what they are doing and actively try to punish or exclude the person who "corrected" them.

In the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes )

a child spoke up while others remained silent - afraid of what might happen to them if the told the King the truth.

The reason this is popular tale has been translated into 100 languages, is that this kind of behavior is so common.

The irony is that not about intellect. but emotions.

Has anyone else on this list had the experience of be punished after correctly pointing out a flaw in someone else's logic?

Is this behavior at odds with the goals and best interests of the group?

I am concerned that there is only place in TDWG for the Kings and those that allow them to keep there Ego's happy.

Respectfully,

• Pete

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:46 PM, joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu mailto:jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> wrote:

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg
Whitbread,
and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task
group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document
comprising
i. use cases and competency questions;
ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via
rdf and
sparql; and
iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches
illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at
http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG
and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area
where
we're still open is the question of whether or not our
deliverable should
be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter
reflects
our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our
"book of use
cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by
the TAG
to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web
Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you
accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that
convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do
so. If
you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet
contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't
wait! Feel
free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't
have to
be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we
receive, and
submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in
hopes of
being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks!
Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/


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tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org <mailto:tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org>
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--

Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu mailto:pdevries@wisc.edu TaxonConcept http://www.taxonconcept.org/ & GeoSpecies http://about.geospecies.org/ Knowledge Bases A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data http://linkeddata.org/ Project

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