I thought this first ALA Newsletter was well worth posting to
the lists.
Lee Belbin
TDWG Secretariat
From: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
[mailto:Donald.Hobern@csiro.au]
Sent: Friday, 13 June 2008 10:15 AM
To: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
Subject: ALA Newsletter 1
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Atlas of Living Australia
Newsletter 1 (10 June 2008) Welcome to the Atlas
of Living Australia newsletter The Atlas of Living Australia project is now making progress
and we plan to produce a regular informational newsletter to keep stakeholders
and friends aware of what is happening. We would appreciate it if you could
pass this first newsletter on to interested colleagues. Please send an email to Wolf Wanjura (Wolf.Wanjura@csiro.au)
if you wish to be added to the mailing list for this newsletter, or if you
wish to be removed from the list. The project The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a five-year project
funded under the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research
Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and involving a wide range of
Australian scientific institutions and organisations (see http://www.ala.org.au/participants.htm).
The goal of the project is to develop web-based tools to
enable users to discover, access and use the widest possible range of
information resources relating to Australia's fauna and flora, including
databases from natural history collections and ecological field work, images
and other multimedia, text documents, identification tools and molecular
data. A presentation giving an overview of some of the planned
project activities can be found at http://www.ala.org.au/documents.htm
(PowerPoint, 11.5MB; PDF, 2.3MB) ALA web site The ALA has launched its web site (http://www.ala.org.au/).
At present it mostly comprises information about the project and its
participant organisations, but the site will increasingly include information
and discussions on the planning and implementation of the project. Ultimately
it will become the ALA portal for discovering information on all Australian
species. ALA user needs analysis What can you do for the ALA today? We need your contacts in
biodiversity – lots of them, and from as many different fields as you
can identify. We want to ask them (and you) a few simple questions. We have commissioned a small team to investigate how users
access such information today and how they use it in their own studies and
decision-making. Over the next few months, this team will be contacting many
of you to learn more about your needs. Please give them your support - we
want to understand how the ALA can become a useful tool for you in your work. For more information on this process, see http://www.ala.org.au/userneedsanalysis.htm. TDWG 2008 conference to be held in Perth TDWG, the international biodiversity information standards
organisation (http://www.tdwg.org/),
will hold its annual conference at the Western Australian Maritime Museum,
Perth, 19-25 October 2008. One day of the conference will be devoted
specifically to the Atlas of Living Australia and will include workshops to
explore ways for the project to meet the needs of Australian researchers. For more information on the conference, see http://www.ala.org.au/tdwg2008.htm. ALA review of online and desktop tools Paul Flemons and John Tann from the Australian Museum have carried out an
extensive review of software components which could feed into the development
of the Atlas or which could be of benefit to data providers or users. The
results of this review are online at http://alatools.pbwiki.com/. Please take a
look at this resource and suggest any additional tools which should be
included. For more information on this review, see http://www.ala.org.au/toolsurvey.htm. ALA and GBIF We have started discussions with the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF, http://www.gbif.org/) to
ensure that the ALA can act as the Australian node within GBIF. The ALA
expects to reuse code from the GBIF Data Portal to develop its own cache of
Australian biodiversity records. This cache will then serve as an
efficient way to integrate Australian data into GBIF’s global network.
The ALA has also begun discussions with GBIF New Zealand on possible
ways to share resources and align activity. Other activity Over the last few months the ALA team has been working on the
following tasks:
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