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DCMI Webinar: Modeling and Publishing of Controlled Vocabularies for the UNESKOS Project
by DCMI Announce 04 May '16

04 May '16

*******PLEASE EXCUSE THE CROSS-POSTING******* *DCMI/ASIS&T Joint Webinar:* Modeling and Publishing of Controlled Vocabularies for the UNESKOS Project *Note: To be presented in Spanish* *=======================* *:: Presenter:* Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez *:: Times: *10:00am - 11:15am EDT (UTC 14:00 - World Clock: http://bit.ly/webinar-sánchez) *:: Date: *Wednesday, 18 May 2016 *:: Free Registration: * http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016sanchez *=======================* *ABOUT THE WEBINAR:* This webinar presents the modeling and publishing process of the vocabularies for the UNESKOS project by applying Semantic Web technologies. More specifically, the vocabularies represented are the UNESCO Thesaurus and the Nomenclature for fields of Science and Technology. Both vocabularies are published as RDF datasets with a structure that allows its query and reuse according to the principles of Linked Open Data. The webinar will demonstrate the application of ISO-25964 standard to represent the UNESCO thesaurus using SKOS and the ISO-THES ontology. Technological solutions used for the project will also be discussed. *ABOUT THE PRESENTER:* *Juan Antonio Pastor Sánchez* is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Documentation at the University of Murcia in Spain with specializations in Library Science and Documentation. He holds a PhD from the University of Murcia. He performs research in the areas of theory and models of hypertext, automation in thesaurus management, technology models for the management of information and knowledge organization, techniques and specifications for the Semantic Web, and accessibility, usability and information architecture for the Web.

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Apply now: iDigBio Georeferencing for Research Use, a short course
by Deborah Paul 03 May '16

03 May '16

Hi Everyone! iDigBio (https://www.idigbio.org), the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) (http://ccber.ucsb.edu/), and NCEAS (https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/) are pleased to announce the: Short Course: iDigBio Georeferencing for Research Use, Santa Barbara, California, Oct 4 - 7, 2016. Application submission deadline: Monday May 30th, 2016. To Apply for a Spot: https://www.idigbio.org/content/apply-now-georeferencing-research-use-short… *Limited space*: 24 slots. Applicants notified of decisions by mid-June 2016. *Course Location*: NCEAS (https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/), Santa Barbara, California *Who*: Interested members of current TCNs and the broader biodiversity natural history collections community actively mobilizing and using biological and paleontological specimen locality data for research. *When*: 4 days. Tuesday to Friday, Oct 4 - 7, 2016 (Monday October 3 and Saturday October 8 are travel days). Our focus is on research use of georeferenced natural history collections data. We will include activities and discussions about best practices and tools for georeferencing, capturing locality data in the field, and using georeferenced specimen locality data in research. Attendees must have a basic level of experience with georeferencing techniques and tools. Please share widely. Thank you. Looking forward to your applications. Debbie Paul, on behalf of the planning team (please excuse cross-postings) -- Upcoming iDigBio Events https://www.idigbio.org/calendar -- Deborah Paul, iDigBio Digitization and Workforce Training Specialist iDigBio -- Steering Committee Member, SPNHC Liaison, SYNTHESYS3 Representative Institute for Digital Information, 234 LSB Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306 850-644-6366

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Webinar: Insights into (NHM) Inselect Software, Tuesday 29th March, 11 am EDT (4pm BST)
by Deborah Paul 18 Apr '16

18 Apr '16

Hi Everyone, As BIS (TDWG) members, you've likely heard of Inselect. This upcoming webinar at iDigBio will give an overview of the software, how it can be integrated into existing digitization workflows and a discussion of areas for development and possible future applications. The talk will be of interest to curators, digitizers and IT staff. Inselect is under active development at the NHM. We are very excited to engage with the community and receive feedback and ideas. *Webinar*: Insights into Inselect Software: automating image processing, barcode reading, and validation of user-defined data *WEBINAR Announcement and Details https*://www.idigbio.org/content/insights-inselect-software-automating-image-processing-barcode-reading-and-validation-user *When*: Tuesday 29th March, 11 am EDT (4pm BST) *Presenters*: Lawrence Hudson and Ben Price, Natural History Museum, London. *Where*: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/datamgmt Contact for questions: Lawrence Hudson, Software Developer for Inselect l.hudson AT nhm.ac.uk The software combines image processing, barcode reading, batch processing and validation of user-defined data to offer a high level of automation. Inselect has been used by curators and digitizers within the Natural History Museum, London, to process in excess of 100,000 specimens so far and is presently being used by several institutions on pinned insects, microscope slides, paleontological specimens, dried sponges and other specimen types. *Background reading* PLOS ONE paper on Inselect: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143402 Home page with source code, issues and releases: https://github.com/NaturalHistoryMuseum/inselect You can install it to try it yourself. Download installer software from the *releases* tab Best, Deb, et al at iDigBio on behalf of the NHM and Inselect From iDigBio: This webinar brought to you by the Inselect developers and the NHM as one outcome of a break-out group at iDigBio Summit V on ideas for scaling up digitization. -- -- Upcoming iDigBio Events https://www.idigbio.org/calendar -- Deborah Paul, iDigBio Technology Specialist iDigBio -- Steering Committee Member SPNHC Liaison, SYNTHESYS3 Representative Institute for Digital Information, 234 LSB Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306 850-644-6366

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<48 hours to add your voice to the ODD Collectors Working Group Survey
by Stanley, Katelin 21 Mar '16

21 Mar '16

<48 hours to participate in the iDigBio ODD Collectors Working Group Survey! We are seeking biodiversity specimen collectors and preparators to participate in this survey by iDigBio's Outlier Detection and Documentation by Collectors (ODD Collectors) Working Group. It should take no more than 10-15 minutes of your time to complete. For our usage, outliers are defined as individual specimens that differ from a previously documented or perceived general norm within a taxon in any biological characteristic such as morphology, anatomy, distribution, behavior, phenology, or ecology. Please respond by the end of the day tomorrow (March 22, 2016) at the following link: https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe1/form/SV_e2nOw1VWI25Rn2B Thank you for considering this request! Please direct questions to Katelin Stanley (kstanley(a)bio.fsu.edu<mailto:kstanley@bio.fsu.edu>) or Austin Mast (amast(a)bio.fsu.edu<mailto:amast@bio.fsu.edu>). With best regards, Katelin Stanley, Austin Mast, and the rest of iDigBio's ODD Collectors Working Group

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DCMI Webinar Series: Generic Tools and Methods for SKOS-based Concept Schemes
by DCMI Announce 02 Mar '16

02 Mar '16

*******PLEASE EXCUSE THE CROSS-POSTING******* *DCMI/ASIST Joint Webinar Series in partnership with AIMS: Agricultural Information Management Standards* SKOS in Two Parts: Generic Tools and Methods for SKOS-based Concept Schemes *with Joachim Neubert (ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) & Osma Suominen (National Library of Finland)* *====================================================* *:: Dates:* Wednesday, 16 March 2016 & Wednesday, 6 April 2016 *:: Time: * 10:00am - 11:15am EDT (UTC 14:00:00) *:: Registration Information: * http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016neubert *====================================================* *ABOUT THE WEBINAR SERIES:* In the past seven years, SKOS has become a widely recognized and used common interchange format for thesauri, classifications, and other types of vocabularies. This has opened a huge opportunity for the development of generic tools and methods that should apply to all vocabularies that can be expressed in SKOS. While expensive, proprietary or custom-developed solutions aimed at one particular thesaurus or classification have been dominant, now more and more open source tools are being created to deal with various aspects of vocabulary management. In this series of two webinars with Joachim Neubert (ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) and Osma Suominen (National Library of Finland), we start on 16 March 2016 with Webinar 1 by examining skos-history, a method and toolset to nail down changes in a vocabulary. We follow with Webinar 2 on 6 April 2016 focusing on Skosmos, a full-fledged web application for publishing SKOS vocabularies. *ABOUT WEBINAR 1 (16 March 2016):* Change Tracking in Knowledge Organization Systems with skos-history When a new version of a vocabulary is published, users want to know "What’s new?" and "What has changed?" Vocabulary managers had differing strategies to answer these questions—relying on internal logs of the vocabulary management system or the intellectual collection of changes deemed relevant. These methods generally are not available to third parties using a vocabulary, or for example are trying to keep vocabulary mappings up to date. Having vocabularies published in SKOS as RDF triples has changed this situation: Vocabularies can be compared algorithmically, and deltas between versions can be computed. This data can be loaded into a version store, and evaluated by SPARQL queries. Therefore, the published versions alone are sufficient to get the differences. The webinar will explain how you can create a version store, how skos-history interlinks versions and deltas, and how queries can get a grip on added or removed concepts, on changed notations, or on merges and splits of concepts. We will show how aggregated change information about a concept scheme can be obtained, and how the complete change history of a single concept across multiple versions can be traced. Finally, you will learn how you can adapt skos-history queries to the features of a particular concept scheme in which you are interested. *ABOUT WEBINAR 2 (6 April 2016):* Publishing SKOS Concept Schemes with Skosmos With more and more thesauri, classifications and other knowledge organization systems being published as Linked Data using SKOS, the question arises how best to make them available on the web. While just publishing the Linked Data triples is possible using a number of RDF publishing tools, those tools are not very well suited for SKOS data, because they cannot support term-based searching and lookup. This webinar presents Skosmos, an open source web-based SKOS vocabulary browser that uses a SPARQL endpoint as its back-end. It can be used by e.g. libraries and archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto, operated by the National Library of Finland, is built using Skosmos. Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has been developed by analyzing the results of repeated usability tests. All of the SKOS data is made available as Linked Data. A developer-friendly REST API is also available providing access for using vocabularies in other applications such as annotation systems. We will describe what kind of infrastructure is necessary for Skosmos and how to set it up for your own SKOS data. We will also present examples where Skosmos is being used around the world. *ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:* *Joachim Neubert* is a scientific software developer at the ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (http://www.zbw.eu). He published the STW Thesaurus for economics (http://zbw.eu/stw) and several other datasets as Linked Open Data. In 2009, he started the SWIB – Semantic Web for Libraries conference and serves to date as co-chair of its programme committee. As an "invited expert", he took an active part in the Library Linked Data Incubator Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His research interests include knowledge organization systems and authorities, linked data, and web-based information systems and applications, on which he reports once in a while on ZBW Labs (http://zbw.eu/labs). *Osma Suominen* is currently working as information systems specialist at the National Library of Finland. He is involved in publishing library data as Linked Data, maintaining the Finto.fi thesaurus and ontology service, and leading development of the Skosmos vocabulary browser used in Finto. He is currently also assisting FAO (UN), CABI (UK), and NAL (US) in creating a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme by merging their existing thesauri, using Linked Data tools and approaches. Osma Suominen earned his doctoral degree at Aalto University while doing research on semantic portals and quality of controlled vocabularies within the FinnONTO series of projects. His past accomplishments include the Skosify vocabulary analysis and quality improvement tool, and data.aalto.fi, the Linked Data service of Aalto University. *Registration:* http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016neubert

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Calling all collectors! iDigBio Survey on Biological Outliers
by Stanley, Katelin 23 Feb '16

23 Feb '16

Calling all biodiversity specimen collectors and preparators! iDigBio's Outlier Detection and Documentation by Collectors (ODD Collectors) Working Group would be grateful for 10-15 minutes of your time to complete an anonymous survey related to your experience with "outliers" (or "anomalies" or "oddities") in biodiversity collections. For our usage, outliers are defined as individual specimens that differ from a previously documented or perceived general norm within a taxon in any biological characteristic such as morphology, anatomy, distribution, behavior, phenology, or ecology. To participate, follow the link below. We hope to see your response by March 22, 2016. https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe1/form/SV_e2nOw1VWI25Rn2B We would also appreciate your help in promoting the survey by forwarding this email to any interested parties, "liking" our iDigBio Facebook post (https://www.facebook.com/iDigBio/), and retweeting our iDigBio tweet (https://twitter.com/iDigBio/status/702178743956205568). Please direct questions to Katelin Stanley (kstanley(a)bio.fsu.edu<mailto:kstanley@bio.fsu.edu>) or Austin Mast (amast(a)bio.fsu.edu<mailto:amast@bio.fsu.edu>). Thanks for considering this request! With best regards, Katelin Stanley, Austin Mast, and the rest of iDigBio's ODD Collectors Working Group

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DCMI Webinar - Creating Content Intelligence: Harmonized Taxonomy & Metadata in the Enterprise Context
by DCMI Announce 11 Jan '16

11 Jan '16

*******PLEASE EXCUSE THE CROSS-POSTING******* Creating Content Intelligence: Harmonized Taxonomy & Metadata in the Enterprise Context *DCMI/ASIST Joint Webinar* *===========================================================* *:: Presenter:* Stephanie Lemieux *:: Date:* Wednesday, 27 January 2016 *:: Time:* 10:00am - 11:15am EST (UTC 15:00:00 - World Clock: http://bit.ly/webinar-lemieux) *:: Registration:* http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016lemieux *===========================================================* *ABOUT THE WEBINAR:* Many organizations have content dispersed across multiple independent repositories, often with a real lack of metadata consistency. The attention given to enterprise data is often not extended to unstructured content, widening the gap between the two worlds and making it near impossible to provide accurate business intelligence, good user experience, or even basic findability. How do you bring all those disparate efforts together to create content intelligence across the organization? This webinar will describe the benefits and challenges in developing metadata and taxonomy across multiple functional areas, creating a unified Enterprise Content Architecture (ECA). Hear about real enterprise metadata & taxonomy harmonization projects in different contexts, including a greeting card company, a media company, an automotive manufacturer and a consumer food manufacturer. See how they worked to harmonize across a number of diverse systems that supported multiple functions, from creative processes to manufacturing to reporting. In this webinar, you will learn: - how the concept of Enterprise Content Architecture unifies multiple disciplines, including information management, data management and content strategy; - the difference and similarities between master data and business metadata; - how enterprise-level metadata and taxonomy helps drive semantic interoperability and improve business processes; - how taxonomy can be harmonized across diverse systems and provided as a service; and - how to build support and governance for enterprise-level attention to taxonomy and metadata from within a project. *Participant Experience Level:* Basic familiarity with taxonomy and metadata assumed. *ABOUT THE PRESENTER:* *Stephanie Lemieux* is the President and Primary Consultant at Dovecot Studio. She is a passionate advocate of taxonomy, search and other marvelous pursuits in content organization. She has worked with organizations in various industries, such as Nickelodeon, General Mills, UPS, and the United Nations. Prior to focusing her energies on Dovecot Studio, she was a senior consultant and taxonomy practice lead with Earley & Associates. She speaks, blogs and writes whenever she can to help spread the good taxonomy word. Stephanie has a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from McGill University with a specialization in knowledge management.

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SPNHC 2016 Symposium on Mobilizing NHC Data - Call for Abstracts from iDigBio, RBGE, and UO
by Deborah Paul 05 Jan '16

05 Jan '16

Hi Everyone! Gehen Sie zu SPNHC 2016 Konferenz? Are you going to SPNHC 2016? It's in Berlin this year, from June 20 - 25, 2016. Folks from iDigBio (https://www.idigbio.org/), RBGE (http://www.rbge.org.uk/), and UO (https://uoregon.edu/) are convening a Symposium at SPNHC 2016. With this email, we'd like to invite you to submit an abstract for our consideration. *Symposium:* An International Conversation on Mobilizing Natural History Collections (NHC) Data and Integrating Data for Research. Natural History Collection (NHC) data are being mobilized all over the world. Recent preliminary worldwide survey data suggests the trend is growing. As digitization begins to become an every-day part of collections, many compelling issues vie for attention. For example, cost, prioritization, sustainability, and rates of digitization are four such issues. And, many uses for NHC data are well-known and fairly well-understood. But issues exist with the data, and there is still much legacy data to be digitally captured – before it can be shared with the world’s researchers. We invite presentations from anyone in the collections and biodiversity informatics community who is involved in the mobilization and use of NHC data. We envision an assortment of talks covering three areas: 1. digitization (including imaging) lessons learned and outstanding questions, 2. new and emerging technologies/models, and cross-discipline collaborations for digitization and georeferencing, and 3. collections data-in-action. Our speakers may be, for example, those doing the digitization and mobilization of the data; museum collection administrators actively incorporating digitization into their museum’s mission and vision; computer, information, and library scientists supporting digitization and research efforts; education and outreach staff working with citizen scientists to digitize and georeference; or those using collections data in research. *Abstract* *submission deadline is 15 March 2016. **Note Well:* SPNHC 2016 local organizers are using an online-abstract-submission system and abstract template form you can find here: http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/page15.html Please note in your submission that the abstract is intended for the*International Conversation Symposium *and indicate which track or tracks your talk will address. Please use key tags: #Digitization Lessons Learned, #New Technology, New Strategies, and / or #Collections Data-In-Action. You may direct any specific questions regarding the International Conversation Symposium to session conveners Deb Paul (dpaul(a)fsu.edu), Elspeth Haston (e.haston(a)rbge.org.uk), or Brian Westra (bwestra(a)uoregon.edu) Vielen Dank und Alles Gute für 2016, Many thanks and Happy New Year!, Deb, Elspeth, and Brian Please see the SPNHC symposia page for a detailed abstract <http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/page40.html>http://www.spnhc2016.berlin/page40.html. (please excuse cross-postings) -- -- Upcoming iDigBio Events https://www.idigbio.org/calendar -- Deborah Paul, iDigBio Technology Specialist Institute for Digital Information, 234 LSB Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306 850-644-6366

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DC-2016 Call of Participation - Copenhagen, Denmark
by DCMI Announce 02 Jan '16

02 Jan '16

*DC-2016 Metadata Summit* I*nternational Conference & Annual Meeting* *Copenhagen, Denmark, | 13-16 October 2016* *Collocated with the ASIS&T Annual Meeting* *CALL FOR PARTICIPATION* *==============================* *:: Conference Website:* http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2016/schedConf/ *:: Full Call: * http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2016/schedConf/cfp *==============================* *The Metadata Summit* in Copenhagen launches DCMI's 3rd decade and provides a forum for looking forward to new challenges and backward at challenges met and challenges unresolved. Every year the DCMI community gathers for both its *Annual Meeting* and its *International Conference on Dublin Core & Metadata Applications*. The work agenda of the DCMI community is broad and inclusive of all aspects of innovation in metadata design, implementation, and best practices. While the work of the Initiative progresses throughout the year, the *Conference* and *Annual Meeting* provide the opportunity for DCMI "citizens" as well as newcomers, students, apprentices, and early career professionals to gather face-to-face to share knowledge and experience. The Summit in Copenhagen will provide for public- and private-sector initiatives beyond DCMI that are doing significant metadata work with the opportunity to come together, to compare notes, and to cast a broader light into their particular metadata work silos. Through such a gathering of the metadata communities, DCMI advances its "first goal" of promoting metadata interoperability and harmonization. *Technical Program Submissions:* The Technical Program includes peer-reviewed Papers, Project Reports, and Posters. Submission to the Technical Program will span metadata research, design, and application as a critical core value of effective information systems across domains -- science, humanities, business, government, cultural memory, and the professions. It will explore the domain-crossing intersections of metadata lifecycle documentation, publication, and management. Submissions are welcome that address the challenges of emergent areas of metadata interest including big data and big and smart metadata. The submissions to the Technical Program will be reviewed by an international panel of experts. *Submission Deadline:* 13 May 2016 *Author Notification: *22 July 2016 *Final Copy: *2 September 2016 *Professional Program Submissions:* The Professional Program is key to DCMI's education and training objective and includes *Tutorials*, *Workshops*, *Special Sessions*, and *Best Practice Posters & Demonstrations*. Submissions are reviewed by the *Conference Committee* in consultation with the *DCMI Education Committee*. Selections for the *Tutorial*, *Workshops*, and *Special Sessions* will be based on: (a) the *immediacy* of the submission to current education and training needs of metadata designers, implementers, and practitioners; and (b) the *potential* of the submission to advance innovation in both the discourse and best practice of metadata. *Best Practice Posters & Demonstrations* is a non-peer reviewed track that encourages metadata practitioners in memory institutions, galleries, government and the private sector to showcase work demonstrating innovative approaches to metadata best practices. Selections are based on whether a work presents challenging problems in context; and, whether the authors and conference delegates can benefit from poster session interactions. *Special & Panel Sessions, Workshops, and Tutorials* * Proposal Deadline:* 15 March 2016 * Author Notification:* 15 April 2016 *Best Practice Posters & Demonstration* * Submission Deadline:* 15 July 2016 * Author Notification:* 29 July 2016 ------- Stuart Sutton DCMI Managing Director DCMI is a project of ASIS&T 8555 16th Street, Suite 850, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910

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In Memoriam Dr Richard Pankhurst
by Mergen Patricia 14 Dec '15

14 Dec '15

Dear Colleagues, On behalf of TDWG we are very sorry to inform you that Richard John Pankhurst passed away on Tuesday 26 March after fighting oesophageal cancer for many years. He was a very important contributer and friend of TDWG, as can be judged from his short CV from the BioCISE directory: Dr Richard Pankhurst began his career in computing in the computer section at CERN, Geneva in 1963, and moving back to Cambridge to work on Computer-Aided Design in 1966. In 1971 he moved to the Botany School, Cambridge to begin work on his PANKEY programs for identification and key construction. This was continued at the Botany department of the Natural History Museum from 1974 until 1991, where he was for many years curator of the British herbarium, and also worked on the Flora Meso-Americana. "Biological Identification", 1978, was the first textbook on computer methods in identification. A new version of this book was published by C.U.P in 1991. Also published in that year was the Flora of the Outer Hebrides. With over 50 publications of refereed papers and books in the fields of taxonomic computing he has made major contributions to these fields. Dr. Pankhurst has been very active recently in programming and managing botanical databases (Flora Europaea, BSBI database and PANDORA) and systems with images. He was appointed Principal Scientific Officer at the RGB Edinburgh in 1991. Dr. Pankhurst served on various committees of British and international organizations, among others. Botanical Society of the British Isles, Committee for Scotland and Database Committee. Botanical Society of Scotland, Council. Taxonomic Databases Working Group, convener of Descriptors Group. International Organisation for Plant Information, co-convener of Information Systems Committee, Checklist Committee. Dr. Pankhurst was the head of the Department of Taxonomic Computing at RGBE. After his official retirement, he compiled a large database of the Rose family. His work on recording the wild flowers of the Outer Hebrides took him frequently to these remote islands on behalf of the Botanical Society of the British Isles. His interest in Taraxacum (dandelions) was acknowledged when a species found only on St. Kilda was named *Taraxacum pankhurstianum*. In Richard, not only a very important scientist was lost to our community, but also a very pleasant collaborator and friend . <patricia.mergen(a)africamuseum.be> Dr. Patricia Mergen (General Secretary of TDWG, on behalf of the Executive Committee) Head of Biodiversity Information and Cybertaxonomy Royal Museum for Central Africa Leuvensesteenweg 13 B-3080 Tervuren Belgium + 32 2 769 5 *626* patricia.mergen(a)africamuseum.be

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