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TDWG Annual Conference - Building biodiversity data content - Call for Abstracts
by Adrian Rissone 12 Jul '07

12 Jul '07

TDWG Annual Conference (http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007) Bratislava, Slovakia, 16-22 September 2007 Call for Abstracts ** I will be away from my mail after 19 July. If you intend to respond to this call please contact me before then ** Symposium: Discovery, Integration and Use of Biodiversity Data Session: Building biodiversity data content (Friday 21 September) The idea of the session is to get away from the technical aspects of managing biodiversity data and to ask the wider community to tell us: 1) what is needed in terms of: - non-technical standards (standard lists, authorities, etc.) - on-line services - collection/specimen documentation standards - other data content standards - tools to help populate biodiversity, observational, ecological and conservation databases 2) what has already achieved (or is being worked on) towards these aims 3) how you can contribute The schedule for the 2007 Conference is very busy and we have space for only five or six verbal presentations. We do have ample space for poster presentations and computer demonstrations. My task is to ask the community for proposed presentations on the session theme, to integrate key verbal presentations into an interesting and thought-provoking session, and to encourage the submission of posters and computer demonstrations. If you think you have something to contribute, please contact me at A.Rissone(a)nhm.ac.uk with Subject line "TDWG 2007: Building biodiversity data content", indicating whether you are proposing a verbal presentation (remember these are very limited), a poster or a computer demonstration.

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Call for presentations for the Commincation, education & outreach session
by Neil Thomson 11 Jul '07

11 Jul '07

Dear all, There is a session at this year's TDWG Annual Conference devoted to "Communication, education & outreach" to take place on Friday 21st September between 0900 and 1030. The session will cover topics of particular relevance to TDWG, such as how biologists get the computer knowledge and skills that they require and, conversely, how computer scientists get the biological knowledge that they require to be able to contribute to the work that TDWG represents. New initiatives and technologies that allow taxonomists to communicate, collaborate and to get the attention and interest of students and others new to the field are of particular interest. If you are interested in making a 15-minute presentation during one of the remaining slots in this session, please contact me by email in the first instance at the address given below. With thanks, Neil ------- Neil Thomson Head of Data & Digital Systems The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5294, Fax: +44 (0)20 7942 5559, Email: n.thomson(a)nhm.ac.uk http://www.nhm.ac.uk

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Call for presentations for TDWG SPM session
by Eamonn O Tuama 10 Jul '07

10 Jul '07

Hello, TDWG are devoting a special session to the Species Profile Model at the upcoming Bratislava conference. It is scheduled for 08.30 to 10.00 on Wed 19 Sept and we hope to fill the slot with up to six short (10-15 min) presentations. For more background info see: http://wiki.tdwg.org/SPM/. You are invited to make suggestions for contributions to this session. Any aspect can be considered, e.g., modelling, vocabularies, use cases, relationship to other species profile schemas, or other TDWG standards, etc. Please contact me if you are interested in making a presentation. Best regards, Éamonn ________________________________________________________________ Éamonn Ó Tuama, Ph.D. (eotuama(a)gbif.org) Senior Programme Officer for Data Access & Database Interoperability (DADI), Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, DENMARK Phone: +45 3532 1494; Fax: +45 3532 1480

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TDWG 2007 Annual Conference - Support for Students and other delegates
by Adrian Rissone 20 Jun '07

20 Jun '07

Biodiversity Information Standards Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) Annual Conference 2007 - Support for Student and other delegates Early in 2007 the TDWG Executive discussed methods of attracting to the Annual Conference talented students, and delegates from countries where travel support for scientists is limited and we are poorly represented. As part of the registration process for the 2007 Conference in Slovakia we have put in place three mechanisms for assisting delegates to attend. Details are available here: http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/registration/support/ <http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/registration/support/> where there is a downloadable PDF file giving details of how to apply. It is essential that applicants look carefully at the Conference website at http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/ <http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/> for details of the registration process and registration fees (including late registration penalty) before submitting an application. Graduate and post-graduate students: Bona fide graduate and post-graduate students at a recognised academic institution may apply for discounted conference registration fees (200 $US) and reserved inexpensive accommodation at the conference venue. Delegates from countries where travel support for scientists is limited: Prospective delegates from countries where travel support for scientists is limited may apply, under strict conditions, for the same discounted conference registration fees (200 $US) and reserved inexpensive accommodation as students. This mechanism is intended to offer a better chance to attend the Conference to delegates who would not otherwise be able to secure sufficient funding. It is unlikely that applications from major industrialised countries, or countries where financial support is limited for political reasons, would be successful. Delegates needing a Letter of Invitation to the Conference: Delegates needing a Letter of Invitation to the Conference in order to secure funding from internal or external funding sources may apply. Provision by TDWG of this Letter does not imply any funding by TDWG, or discounted registration fees, or reserved inexpensive accommodation. Deadlines In all cases the application must be made to the TDWG Secretariat not later than 15 July 2007. Applications submitted after this date may still be considered but are unlikely to be processed before the late registration penalty fee (50 $US) comes into effect on 16 August 2007. The late registration penalty fee will apply to all registrations on or after that date. The number of inexpensive rooms available at the Conference venue is limited. Rooms will be allocated to successful applicants requesting them on a first-come-first-served basis. Applicants are advised to submit their applications as soon as possible. Terms and Conditions Please note that TDWG does not have funds available for direct financial support for delegates to attend the Conference. Discounted registration and reserved inexpensive accommodation are the only financial support options available and are offered at the discretion of the TDWG Executive. Submission and receipt of an application does not commit TDWG in any way. All applications will be considered by the Conference Committee. The decision of the Committee will be final, no reason will be given for declining an application, and no subsequent correspondence will be entered into. Adrian Rissone Executive Secretary (TDWG) and Chair of Conference Committee (TDWG 2007) E-mail: A.Rissone(a)nhm.ac.uk Web: www.tdwg.org

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Announcement: TDWG 2007 Annual Conference
by Adrian Rissone 14 Jun '07

14 Jun '07

Dear Colleague, Please accept our apologies for cross-posting of this announcement. In February we announced the dates and venue of the 2007 Annual Conference - Slovakia in September. Thanks to all those who have contributed since then to preparing the conference framework and the exciting programme. Information on the very full programme, travel, housing and submission of abstracts is now available here: http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/ <http://www.tdwg.org/conference2007/> and the on-line registration site is active here: http://www.regonline.com/128305 <http://www.regonline.com/128305> Please help us prepare for the conference by registering as soon as possible - regular delegates will know how important this is - and be aware of the late registration fee. TDWG members who wish to pay their membership fees can pay them as part of the registration process in one easy transaction. Please note that the Conference registration fee for non-members is higher but that new members may join (or lapsed members pay their dues) and receive an immediate member discount. This will be an important conference. Don't miss it! Thank you for your interest in TDWG, Adrian Rissone Executive Secretary, TDWG Natural History Museum, London Phone +44 20 7942 5239 (voicemail only) Fax +44 20 7942 5546 E-mail a.rissone(a)nhm.ac.uk <mailto:a.rissone@nhm.ac.uk>

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Biodiversity Information Projects - responses
by Lee Belbin 01 Jun '07

01 Jun '07

Dear list members Apologies for cross-postings. We have had an enthusiastic response to the database of biodiversity information related projects (http://www.tdwg.org/activities/bioinformatics-projects/) Thank you. We are now working on ways to improve the system based on your feedback and a few new ideas. Changes should happen quickly, unless they require a lot of work. We have now added definitions of the fields, will add the language of the project as a new field and deal with acronyms in some way. The projects can be of any size or scope (geographic or taxonomic or function), as long as the project deals with the discovery, description, indexing, aggregation, display or analysis/display of biodiversity data. Does that cover it? We have had a number of emails asking us to include unlisted projects. We can do that, but it is preferable to email the contact of the project and suggest they may like to create an entry. The project contacts will be able to generate a higher quality record that we can do. We will also keep adding new content and updating incomplete records. I will be away for a month so please contact Piers Higgs (piers(a)gaiaresources.com.au) with any questions, suggestions and feedback. Piers is however moving his office next week, so be patient for a response. Thank you Lee Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee(a)tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133

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RE: [Taxacom] ITIS, Species 2000, etc.
by Lee Belbin 31 May '07

31 May '07

Dear TDWG list members I apologise to those on taxacom, but wanted to be sure that those interested in TDWG knew about this initiative... It occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a database along the lines of "Biodiversity information projects of the world". And with the help of Piers Higgs (http://www.gaiaresources.com.au/) - we have just in the last few days finished seeding one! http://www.tdwg.org/activities/bioinformatics-projects/ There are about 450 projects seeded in the database of which 295 are 'complete' for the fields that we have surveyed. There is also the ability to amend existing entries and add new entries. These changes/additions go into the database and a few people (including myself) are notified to evaluate these entries. We have the following fields in the database Project_name Project_logo Project_URL Project_description Project_type Date_start Date_end Contact_organisation Contact_person Contact_position Contact_email Key_inputs Key_infrastructure Key_technologies Key_processes Geographic_Scope Geographic_Type Taxonomic_Scope Taxonomic_Type Comments Finalised? Please give it a whirl! Input, amendments and feedback would be appreciated. Lee Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee(a)tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133 -----Original Message----- From: taxacom-bounces(a)mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Edwards, G.B. Sent: Thursday, 31 May 2007 12:46 AM To: taxacom(a)mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ITIS, Species 2000, etc. I appreciate the comments of Anna, Mary, Rich, Rod and others on this subject, and the information links provided, but in many cases, those are for the one organization each is most associated with. Not that this isn't useful, but... Seems to me what we need is an Encyclopedia of Taxonomic Initiatives (or maybe a Reader's Digest Version) which would give us the acronym or title, what it means, what it's purpose is, where it's located, and who it's contact people are (see those listed below plus a "whole host of other initiatives", many of which have come up in subsequent discussions). Also needed is a glossary of acronyms used within each organization. Obviously people who are already involved know what these initiatives are, but I suspect there are many others who might want to be involved in something, but don't want to wade through looking up the specs for a bunch of organizations to find one that seems to fit what they would be willing to do. Not to mention how helpful it would be to know the most appropriate place to go for a particular type of taxonomic information, or to find out that there actually is an organization that databases some obscure group. Yes, you can Google, but then you're still wading through thousands of responses, and you'll probably miss some of the initiatives. There are just too many for any one person to keep track of. How about if the organizers of every initiative send in their information to a central website which can then be made available to everyone (offers to host?). Maybe some of the paralysis will be lifted if people know what their options are. Might bring some of those private collections into the fold. Might even be a good start to organizing the taxonomic community. -- G. B. Edwards Florida State Collection of Arthropods ...One of the goals of the Encyclopedia of Life is to work with groups like uBio, GBIF, ITIS, Species2000, IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank, BHL, and a whole host of other initiatives who deal with taxonomic names to establish what David Remsen of GBIF calls the "BIG Index" (I'll defer to David for elaboration of the name). This would be a giant index of these "usage instances", or the "facts" of taxonomy, as I defined them above (e.g., Smith, 2001, treated "Aus xus" as a junior synonym of "Aus bus"). Building such a comprehensive index is a monumental task, far outside the scope of any single initiative like ITIS or Species2000 or most of the others. But it's not outside the scope of the collective taxonomic community as a whole; which is why ideas like All Species, GBIF's ECAT, and EoL (the latter being the most robustly funded) are so fundamentally important to serve as a "flag pole" around which we can all congregate and coordinate our efforts. ... I share your feeling that paralysis is the usual response. What continually astounds me is how little people are aware of the groundwork that already exists. Most of the issues (GUIDs, generating identifiers, searching based on journal metadata) have already been solved, in some cases (SICIs, OpenURL) a decade ago.

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FW: [Conservation Commons] Biodiversity standards project aims for better government and business decisions
by Lee Belbin 30 May '07

30 May '07

Dear Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) list members I thought the following post to the Conservation Commons list should be of broad interest. Éamonn O Tuama of GBIF and I (representing TDWG) attended the first of the IUCN-OASIS meeting in Gland last month (see http://www.tdwg.org/homepage-news-item/article/lee-attends-iucn-oasis-worksh op-on-biodiversity-standards/). A second meeting hosted by Conservation International in Arlington is planned for June 26 . Éamonn and I plan to attend. I've made the suggestion to Tom Hammond of IUCN that a key requirement before this meeting is a set of use-cases. Recent initiatives on interoperability standards for biodiversity data such as this one in IUCN, EoL and the ILTER are generating a healthy pressure for TDWG to have quality packaged solutions that address client needs. I'm keen to hear any other comments from list members about key issues that should be presented or positions taken. Cheers Lee Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee(a)tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133 _____ From: Chucri Sayegh [mailto:chucri.sayegh@iucn.org] Sent: Wednesday, 30 May 2007 12:24 AM To: biod_commons(a)indaba.iucn.org Subject: [Conservation Commons] Biodiversity standards project aims for better government and business decisions source : http://www.ictstandardization.com/news/200705/article20070564.html Biodiversity standards project aims for better government and business decisions An IUCN/OASIS biodiversity project aims to better tap the vast sea of statistical data on endangered species and protected areas for better information sharing and decisions by business and government. One of the huge challenges in biodiversity conservation is managing the vast quantities of data generated so people can use it, said Tom Hammond, senior program advisor at The World Conservation Union (IUCN). Much biodiversity data is either unavailable or not easily accessible because of fragmentation of data, lack of access or interoperability, IUCN said. The US Geological Surveys National Biodiversity Information Infrastructure (NBII) program is essentially tackling domestically, the same questions that the IUCN/OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) partnership is at the international level, trying to integrate all the biodiversity data and information generated at county level and federally, into one common [information] infrastructure, Hammond said: NBII is part of this process. Canada and other of IUCN's 80 member countries are essentially trying to do the same thing, Hammond said. Many initiatives to improve access to and leveraging of biodiversity data are taking place in governments, scientific and research organizations and in the private sector, Hammond said: Very few of these initiatives are talking to each other." Biodiversity information could be accessed in common ways no matter where the information is being maintained, Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS said: Data gets managed wherever its best gathered and managed. Organizations that need the data shouldnt need multiple kinds of interfaces to access it, Gannon said. This is a common refrain that many, particularly companies in the resource sector oil and gas, mining, forests, agriculture many companies are beginning to step up and say, they need to make better, more informed decisions about where they conduct their business on the ground, Hammond said. Seventy-six organizations have committed to open access to biodiversity data by signing up to a global partnership called the Conservation Commons, Hammond said. They are conservation groups, scientific organizations, government agencies like NASA and NBII, companies like Rio Tinto, Shell and Chevron, Hammond said: From a private sector companys point of view, thats fairly significant because that gets down to issues of disclosure. Many of these companies generate their own data when it comes to their field operations and these companies have formally signed up to say they will make available the data that they generate for whatever field operations theyre involved in." Geospatial approaches will be the platform upon which were going to generate a lot of this work, because the data is from some geographic place on the planet, Hammond said: Essentially what were doing is identifying the minimum standards we need so we can at least share data. The work builds on open standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium, global and regional species taxonomy standards, on-line publishing and referencing, Service Oriented Architectures and others, IUCN said. The work of a group called Biodiversity Information Standards will also be involved. The first step in the process will be identifying what standards work is out there that can be leveraged and whats missing, Hammond said: Theres a minimum list of criteria that you absolutely have to have access to if youre a CEO or a director of a government ministry making a decision. Endangered species, protected areas, key biodiversity areas outside of protected areas, critical ecosystems for the generation of ecosystem goods and services like water, fiber, maintaining soils and non-timber forest products is a very short list of some very key ecosystem and biodiversity elements that we would like to make sure that anyone would have access to, Hammond said. A June meeting in Arlington, Virginia (USA) will begin to tackle the issues. There will be 3 major thrusts: 1) Species; 2) Habitat; 3) Biodiversity conservation vocabulary, which deals with scientific publishing. OASIS and IUCN have been working together for about a year, Gannon said. OASIS will form a Biodiversity Conservation Member Section to work with IUCNs Biodiversity Conservation Standards initiative and the Conservation Commons, IUCN said. An OASIS steering committee will identify various data standards committees and the order that the work progresses. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Reply button in your e-mail program sends your reply to the person posting a message, not to the list. ATTENTION Please: if the message to which you are replying is long, please delete as much of it from your reply as possible to reduce message lengths for other List subscribers. Thank You. To contact the list owners: BioD_Commons-owner(a)indaba.iucn.org To leave this list, send a blank message to: BioD_Commons-leave(a)indaba.iucn.org WWW archives: http://indaba.iucn.org/archives/biod_commons/ The username and password are available from BioD_Commons-owner(a)indaba.iucn.org This message was sent to you at: lee(a)tdwg.org The services and facilities to support this list are provided by The Information Management Group, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland.

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Brochures
by Lee Belbin 21 May '07

21 May '07

Dear list members Two tri-fold A4 brochures (in PDF format) have been prepared- * Recruiting <http://www.tdwg.org/fileadmin/executive/TDWG_Brochure.pdf> members and * Recruiting <http://www.tdwg.org/fileadmin/executive/TDWG_Brochure_IT.pdf> 'information technologists' The latter was considered due to a lack of depth in technical skills in areas where we anticipate considerable pressures due to demand (and where we also fear for the sanity of a number of our overworked members :). Please be encouraged to distribute these brochures far and wide. If anyone wants to print a batch for use at conferences and meetings, please contact me. Thanks Lee Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee(a)tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133

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New Executive Summary document for TAPIR
by Lee Belbin 17 May '07

17 May '07

Dear List Members The TDWG Infrastructure Project sponsored Renato De Giovanni to write a 2-page Executive Summary of TAPIR, now available at- http://www.tdwg.org/dav/subgroups/tapir/1.0/docs/TAPIRExecutiveSummary_2007_ 05_12.html I have also commissioned two pilot video clips similar to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NwfGA4cxJQ I'd be very interested hearing from other Conveners about doing similar documents for other TDWG standards and related activities. I'm also keen to get feedback about broader promotion of such 'high-level' introductions. Should we post these to taxacom for example? It may be nice to have some content:) Also, expect an excellent introduction to LSIDs from the recent Canberra LSID Policy Workshop, soon. And a neat geointeroperability demo.... Cheers Lee Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee(a)tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133

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