Dear Chris,

you are not the first to point out the issue of content. The question, though, that bothers me is that if you had, say $5M for a grant call, what could you do by way of content creation that would make an appreciable difference? Taxonomists would argue that you could, say, bid to get the other half of the plants into CoL, but how much impact would that have? In comparison to wikipedia?

This is a complicated landscape. Taxonomists have largely driven biodiversity informatics and, over a couple of decades, have not delivered effective, joined-up services for the life sciences. That was the motivation that prompted the commission to suggest the white paper. Basically they're asking the question "where can we put funding so that we can see the impact?". Where are the road-blocks?

Don't get me wrong. If someone can make a convincing argument that we can make a breakthrough in usage and linkage of our existing information by the creation of a certain body of content, that would be fabulous.

For your diptera example, I think we need a different approach to make that kind of resource sustainable and scaleable. One possible solution is to follow the open source model and break the problem into small enough bites that can be funded by individual institutions, e.g. as individual server as we do with the Scratchpads. Its no good, though, if they're silos. We also need the tools to join the data together.

Finally, this is not a grant proposal. We're trying to identify priority points for which we need solutions, not propose the solutions themselves. Rod has proposed any number of such bottlenecks in his blogs over the years. Which ones are most important? Make them the basis of a call and see who can devise a good solution.

Cheers, Dave -- On 30 Mar 2012, at 13:59, Chris Thompson wrote:

Thanks, Rod,

for the great comment on the focus should be on "questions," not technologies.

BUT I would add the basic focus should FIRST be on content. The information that can be used to answer questions.

In the half century, I have been in the "biodiversity" business, what has been the clear trend is the continued re-invention of the "infrastructure technologies," investing big bucks in "new and better" software, etc., but virtually nothing on content. The old "taxonomy is free" paradigm. People have questions, they want answer, so the critical component is content, the information necessary to answer those question. Not so new technology to simply re-scuffle the old information.

We run the Systema Dipterorum (see us at www.diptera.org), an online nomenclator and species database for more than 10% of the known biodiversity, flies (Insecta: Diptera), which are critical as they have one of this highest impact on human society, as disease vectors, pollinators, crop pests, biological control agents, model organisms (Drosophila), forensics indicators, etc. We provide basic information on more than 160,000 species and a quarter of million names, with simple obsolete software (FileMakerPro version 6), but as we have a budget of only some 50K per year we focus on content, trying to keep up with the thousands of new species being added annually, etc. And enhancement of our basic content.

What we need is support to improve our content, to enhance it, to have it "peer-reviewed," etc. No some new software to simply re-format it.

Oh, well ...

back to the data ...

Sincerely,

Chris

see us at www.diptera.org

-----Original Message----- From: Roderic Page Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 3:43 AM To: Dave Roberts Cc: Norman Morrison ; Peter van Tienderen ; Hannu Saarenmaa ; Alex Hardisty ; tdwg@lists.tdwg.org ; taxacom Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Whitepaper consultation on Biodiversity Informatics

Dear Dave,

This sounds like a great opportunity.

That said, I little part of me dies when I read "infrastructure" documents. The focus is invariably on technologies rather than questions, and I don't think people actually want "infrastructure", they want things to help them do the things they're trying to do (as opposed to cool things that could be built for them).

I've made some comments on the topics, but rather than pollute your own outline with my grumpiness, I've made a copy and scribbled some thoughts on that. The annotated document is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VLvysjbm6IUhceAEgkAWSQ9yc71YK-9_48bPNZAC... or http://bit.ly/H17nLs if that link gets mangled.

Regards

Rod

On 29 Mar 2012, at 12:31, Dave Roberts wrote:

...

Dear Colleague,

we need funding to pursue biodiversity research, but funding is under huge pressure. One area for which there is potential is in biodiversity informatics because we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way we handle data. Now it is expected that data will be openly accessible, presenting huge opportunities if only the data can be found when needed.

There is a strong need for a community voice to present the funders with a set of priorities. We have successfully built a number of infrastructural components, such as INSDC, GBIF, Catalogue of Life, but we lack the bridges to allow users to integrate elements from these resources to address a simple question.

With the encouragement of the European Commission, we are launching a consultation to write a White Paper on biodiversity informatics. We have made a list of potential chapters with a brief outline of what they might cover here:

http://is.gd/WhitePaperChapters

This document is a public Google doc. The approach we propose is to ask for volunteers to lead the development of each chapter.

• If you can identify a new chapter, please add it to the Chapters list

• If you are prepared to lead a chapter, put your name against the chapter, open a new public googledoc and past the link into the chapters list.

• Please do not create chapters dedicated to specific disciplines, such as molecular biology, because there is no way to prioritise one discipline against another.

• Three funded EU projects will administer the production of the white paper. agINFRA, BioVeL and ViBRANT will supply. We will edit the chapters for continuity and will produce an executive summary.

• If you are able to join the editorial group, email one of the organisers. We expect this to work by self-nomination.

The European Commission would like access to such a community view in forming the funding calls under Horizon2020. It is possible that other funders may pay similar attention. It makes no sense to do this over just Europe. We recognise that biodiversity is global and we need global priorities.

Timetable 27 April: initial draft chapters; propose group meetings with dates in May

1 June: refined chapters merged by editorial group

22 June: draft executive summary and edited chapters

July: public meeting

1st Sept: Publication of white paper

This timetable is tight because the Horizon2020 funding calls will be drafted in the last quarter of 2012. To have real benefit in Europe, we need to move quickly.

Organising Group: Alex Hardisty <hardistyAR_at_cardiff_dot_ac_dot_uk> Dave Roberts <dmr_at_nomencurator_dot_org> Hannu Saarenmaa <hannu_dot_saarenmaa_at_uef_dot_fi> Norman Morrison <norman_at_nmorrison_dot_info> Peter van Tienderen <P_dot_H_dot_vanTienderen_at_uva_dot_nl> -- Dr D.McL. Roberts, Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 5086 Dept. Zoology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD Great Britain Email: dmr@nomencurator.org Web page: http://scratchpads.eu http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/euk-extreme/ -- "The intent of [bureaucratic] language is not to deceive, it is to preserve one's interpretive latitude so that if context changes a new more approporiate meaning can be attached to the language already used." Matthew Crawford (The case for working with your hands, Penguin 2010) --

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Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

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