Dear TDWG list members

I apologise to those on taxacom, but wanted to be sure that those interested in TDWG knew about this initiative...

It occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a database along the lines of "Biodiversity information projects of the world". And with the help of Piers Higgs (http://www.gaiaresources.com.au/) - we have just in the last few days finished seeding one!

http://www.tdwg.org/activities/bioinformatics-projects/

There are about 450 projects seeded in the database of which 295 are 'complete' for the fields that we have surveyed. There is also the ability to amend existing entries and add new entries. These changes/additions go into the database and a few people (including myself) are notified to evaluate these entries.

We have the following fields in the database

Project_name Project_logo Project_URL Project_description Project_type Date_start Date_end Contact_organisation Contact_person Contact_position Contact_email Key_inputs Key_infrastructure Key_technologies Key_processes Geographic_Scope Geographic_Type Taxonomic_Scope Taxonomic_Type Comments Finalised?

Please give it a whirl! Input, amendments and feedback would be appreciated.

Lee

Lee Belbin Manager, TDWG Infrastructure Project Email: lee@tdwg.org Phone: +61(0)419 374 133

-----Original Message----- From: taxacom-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Edwards, G.B. Sent: Thursday, 31 May 2007 12:46 AM To: taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ITIS, Species 2000, etc.

I appreciate the comments of Anna, Mary, Rich, Rod and others on this subject, and the information links provided, but in many cases, those are for the one organization each is most associated with. Not that this isn't useful, but...

Seems to me what we need is an Encyclopedia of Taxonomic Initiatives (or maybe a Reader's Digest Version) which would give us the acronym or title, what it means, what it's purpose is, where it's located, and who it's contact people are (see those listed below plus a "whole host of other initiatives", many of which have come up in subsequent discussions). Also needed is a glossary of acronyms used within each organization. Obviously people who are already involved know what these initiatives are, but I suspect there are many others who might want to be involved in something, but don't want to wade through looking up the specs for a bunch of organizations to find one that seems to fit what they would be willing to do. Not to mention how helpful it would be to know the most appropriate place to go for a particular type of taxonomic information, or to find out that there actually is an organization that databases some obscure group. Yes, you can Google, but then you're still wading through thousands of responses, and you'll probably miss some of the initiatives. There are just too many for any one person to keep track of.

How about if the organizers of every initiative send in their information to a central website which can then be made available to everyone (offers to host?). Maybe some of the paralysis will be lifted if people know what their options are. Might bring some of those private collections into the fold. Might even be a good start to organizing the taxonomic community. -- G. B. Edwards Florida State Collection of Arthropods

...One of the goals of the Encyclopedia of Life is to work with groups like uBio, GBIF, ITIS, Species2000, IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank, BHL, and a whole host of other initiatives who deal with taxonomic names to establish what David Remsen of GBIF calls the "BIG Index" (I'll defer to David for elaboration of the name). This would be a giant index of these "usage instances", or the "facts" of taxonomy, as I defined them above (e.g., Smith, 2001, treated "Aus xus" as a junior synonym of "Aus bus"). Building such a comprehensive index is a monumental task, far outside the scope of any single initiative like ITIS or Species2000 or most of the others. But it's not outside the scope of the collective taxonomic community as a whole; which is why ideas like All Species, GBIF's ECAT, and EoL (the latter being the most robustly funded) are so fundamentally important to serve as a "flag pole" around which we can all congregate and coordinate our efforts. ...

I share your feeling that paralysis is the usual response. What continually astounds me is how little people are aware of the groundwork that already exists. Most of the issues (GUIDs, generating identifiers, searching based on journal metadata) have already been solved, in some cases (SICIs, OpenURL) a decade ago.