Hi Everyone,

You're all invited to join us at an iDigBio webinar next week: *Shaping the semantic layer by mining digitised data: ** **an encounter between iDigBio's plant records and the Environment Ontology (ENVO) *https://www.idigbio.org/content/webinar-shaping-semantic-layer-mining-digiti... ** Abstract*: Domain ontologies seek to represent the entities in an area of investigation alongside their interrelations in a logically coherent manner. Domain knowledge is the lifeblood of these ontologies and initiatives such as iDigBio offer valuable repositories which contain both legacy and contemporary knowledge and are ripe for mining. The Environment Ontology (ENVO http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/ENVO) is a domain ontology that is concerned with environments, ecosystems, habitats, and related entities.

We performed a cursory text-mining exercise focusing on iDigBio's plant habitat descriptions to learn what terms and phrases the botany community - past and present - have used to describe the environments they sample. The results are being used to guide the creation of new classes and relations in ENVO, ensuring the ontology is fit to represent the environmental aspects of these early waves of digitised plant data. In this webinar, I will describe our approach, some of its early results, and the main challenges we face going forward./There is considerable scope to refine and extend this approach to other digitised data and power synergy between the semantic layer and data repositories./

*Presenters: *Dr. Pier Luigi Buttigieg HGF-MPG Group for Deep Sea Ecology and Technology Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung c/o Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology Celsiusstrasse 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany Email: pbuttigi@mpi-bremen.de mailto:pbuttigi@mpi-bremen.de and Grant Godden Research Associate, Mint Genome Project Buell Lab http://buell-lab.plantbiology.msu.edu/index.shtml Michigan State University Email: goddengr@msu.edu mailto:goddengr@msu.edu Former iDigBio Graduate Student, Soltis Lab

*Where*: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/datamgmt *When:* Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - 9:00am to 1:00am EST (Tallahassee, Florida) That's 3:00 pm to 4 pm CET (Berlin, Germany)

See you there and please share this posting with other interested parties. Thanks! Deb Paul, et al in the iDigBio Data Management Interest Group (please excuse cross-postings)