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 |
