Dear Donald, TDWG Members and
Friends,
GBIF supports your drive to use the GISIN community's
requirements as a test bed to demonstrate how the various TDWG standards can be
applied to solve their informatics issues. Last January, we convened a three day
workshop for the main Darwin Core (DwC) developers to enable them to make the
final push before submitting their work to the TDWG standards ratification
process. The proposed DwC standard, now submitted, provides a mechanism for
extending its base capabilities by adding new terms to the DwC vocabulary. The
basic technical solution for developing an extensible data encoding / transfer
schema is thus in place for invasive species data.
In addition, GBIF has just released the first public
version of the Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) v1.0
(http://www.gbif.org/News/NEWS1238568696) which was demonstrated to great
interest at the last TDWG Conference in Perth. The goal of the IPT is to remove
constraints to the publishing and flow across networks of biodiversity data. It
provides simple interfaces to transfer complete data stores efficiently in order
to simplify the publishing process and reduce the latency between data
publication and discoverability through the GBIF indexes. Accommodating three
main data types - taxon primary occurrence data, taxonomic checklists and
resource metadata - the IPT enables users to publish data residing in local
databases, upload existing files, and access central services to make use of
standardised controlled vocabularies. The IPT uses a "star schema", i.e., a
one-to-many schema in which a core record (expressed as DwC) can be linked to
many additional descriptors. The DwC record in IPT does not need to be an
occurrence. For checklist publishing we use the same DwC elements, but the
record in that case represents a species name, not an occurrence, and any star
schema extensions would be linking to species. For GISIN, those extensions can
cover relevant areas such as management, impact, descriptions, images, related
documents, distributions, dispersal, etc. The challenge for us is therefore to
help the GISIN community to define extensions to DwC and to develop customized
(thematic) portals that process and present the invasive species data according
to their particular requirements, e.g. tracking species movements.
The IPT allows the sharing and use of specialist
extensions amongst the IPT-user community. It can also act as an outreach tool
for the GISIN community as it includes a web application that allows browsing
and searching of published data, along with basic mapping services including
Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service and Web Feature Service.
We support the idea of a "cook book" that helps
communities use and, where required, extend standards to enable sharing of
biodiversity data. GBIF, through its Training portfolio will be able to
contribute documentation and training materials on many topics, e.g., the IPT,
metadata, web services.
With regards,
Éamonn
_______________________________________________
Éamonn Ó Tuama, M.Sc., Ph.D. (eotuama@gbif.org),
Senior Programme Officer, Inventory, Discovery, Access
(IDA),
Global Biodiversity Information
Facility Secretariat,
Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø,
DENMARK
Phone: +45 3532 1494; Fax: +45 3532
1480
From:
tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of
Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
Sent: 25 March 2009 00:43
To:
tdwg@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: [tdwg] Consolidating TDWG
work
Dear TDWG Members and Friends,
Those of you who attended the conference in Perth last year
will remember Annie Simpson's explanation of how hard it still is for a group
like the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN) to take TDWG's work
and apply it directly to solve data integration issues in their
community.
As I have previously suggested, I believe we should look
closely at GISIN's requirements and make sure that those in a similar situation
have all the tools and documentation required to start connecting data
easily in ways that are compatible with TDWG standards. We have most of
the pieces in place. We just need to organise and document them
better.
Invasive species are of great significance to many
countries. This means that addressing GISIN's requirements is
directly relevant to a large number of TDWG participants. However
their scenario is also a template for data sharing in many other
biodiversity-related projects. They need to aggregate information from
many sources to populate several inter-related data models (BioStatus,
Occurrences, ProfileURLs, ImpactStatus, ManagementStatus and
DispersalStatus). Several of these are very close to existing data
models based on TDWG standards (for example, the Occurrence model can
be considered to be extended Darwin Core). Others are examples
of the kind of community-specific data which all biodiversity projects need to
share.
TDWG's goal should be to ensure that GISIN and similar
groups can follow a simple set of instructions (a "cook book") and use standard
tools to build a network of this kind, and that they can do so in a way
which ensures that related communities can also benefit from the data they
share. For example, if GISIN members use the GISIN toolkit to share
data, we ought to make sure that no further steps are required for GBIF,
OBIS and others to integrate GISIN Occurrence data into their own
indexes of species occurrences, or for EOL, ALA and others to integrate GISIN
ImpactStatus, ManagementStatus and DispersalStatus data into their species
profiles.
I am therefore writing this email as an appeal for TDWG
members to step forward and help to complete the work we have started. I
am setting a challenge for us to do whatever still needs to be done to our
standards, tools and data sharing recommendations so that we can produce such a
cook book by the end of 2009. I don't believe this is an unrealistic
goal. We can start work now on identifying and resolving issues. We
can plan activities at the 2009 TDWG conference in November to resolve any
issues still outstanding at that point and to hold hackathon activities to fill
any gaps in our tool set. This work also aligns well with the e-Biosphere
conference's plan to develop a roadmap for biodiversity informatics for the next
10 years.
We have added a page to the TDWG Invasive Species wiki to
seed discussion of what we need to do - http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/InvasiveSpecies/GisinRequirements.
Please take the time to look at this page (and at the information on GISIN's
requirements at http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/InvasiveSpecies/WebHome
and http://www.niiss.org/cwis438/websites/GISINDirectory/Tech/ProtocolSpecification.php).
Append comments and suggestions on what else we may need to do to the wiki, or
simply reply to this message. In particular, if you are interested in
being involved with the relevant TDWG Interest Groups in addressing some of the
listed requirements, please contact me or the relevant Interest Group
leaders.
I believe this is the most significant thing that TDWG can
do right now to support the work of biodiversity informatics worldwide.
Please consider making your own contribution to make it
happen.
Best wishes,
Donald
|
|
Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living
Australia CSIRO Entomology, GPO Box 1700, Canberra,
ACT 2601 Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au |