*** I apologise to those who receive this by multiple routes. ***
Dear TDWG Members and Friends,
We are just about at the mid-point between TDWG annual meetings and activity within subgroups is at a natural low. This is however a good time to review the status of all our projects and activities and to try to identify the key things we would like to see happen during the rest of the year. Biodiversity Informatics remains an active and developing area of research and we are getting closer to supporting a new generation of biodiversity data applications.
The recent launch of the Encyclopedia of Life demo pages is a powerful reminder of several things. First, there is a great interest in marshalling information on the world's biodiversity. Secondly, there is an enormous need for us to find new and faster ways to bring large quantities of high-quality data online. Thirdly, we still have plenty of work ahead of us in finding better ways to make all of these data interoperate freely so that they can become part of a rich and developing store of knowledge. TDWG has a critical role to play in ensuring that all this happens in a well-structured way.
TDWG is joining with a wide range of other biodiversity informatics organisations to plan the e-Biosphere conference to be held in London in 2009. This meeting is intended to showcase what is happening in our field and we must consider what we would most like to have demonstrated in such a forum. What are the big applications which our wider community could soon deliver to support science and sound policy? What tools would we like to be able to put in the hands of researchers, administrators or the general public? What do we need to start doing now to make these possible?
I am of course facing these same questions in the Australian context. When I consider the key areas where the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) needs to make rapid progress, TDWG has a significant role to play in all of them. Some particular focus areas include:
* Improving the quality and management of metadata - the ALA needs a metadata repository to manage information on biodiversity data sets and will be seeking to develop a repository which is compatible both with other national repositories and also with international developments in biodiversity informatics * Lowering the technical threshold for sharing biodiversity data in structured forms - the ALA will be exploring ways to package provider software tools as bundles requiring minimal configuration (and will explore offering a centralised installation of these tools for those who do not wish to maintain a web server) * Developing tools to support online identification - we need to find efficient ways to exploit structured descriptive data where it is available. We also need to supplement these data with well-organised access to the original literature, images, distribution data, etc. in an environment which guides users to the best identifications possible. * Managing data on species interactions - I believe that the most significant class of data we do not handle today is information on the trophic and other relationships between taxa. Many new applications, and new ways to navigate biodiversity data, would become feasible if we could organise what is known in the literature of predator-prey, host-parasite, pollinator-plant and other relationships. I would really like to explore text mining or other approaches as routes to developing significant databases of such information.
These are some of the areas where I would like us to make progress. What would you add to this list?
Finally, I must make an apology. At the TDWG meeting in Bratislava, I made a call for those who would be interested in collaborating on developing a Java implementation of TAPIR. Unfortunately I failed to do anything about this in all the business of moving out to Australia. I do however still know of a couple of groups who would like to do this. If you have an interest in a Java TAPIR implementation, and could contribute to making it happen, please let me know (again) and I will try to get everyone concerned in contact with each other.
Very 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