(From Eamonn)

Dear TDWG Members,

I am very pleased to announce the awarding of a contract to Dr Donat Agosti of Plazi (www.plazi.org) to undertake work on the Species Profile Model (SPM). With funding from Encyclopedia of Life (EOL - www.eol.org), Plazi will develop an SPM extension module as an addendum to their 2007 GBIF Seed Money Award project entitled "Extracting Nomenclatural Data, Species Descriptions and Collecting Events from Legacy Publications: The Zootaxa-TaxonX-ZooBank Project" (GBIF Tracking Number 2007-94). The latter provides, as one of its outputs, biodiversity literature encoded as TaxonX XML documents through the use of the GoldenGate markup tool.

The SPM extension will provide XSLT scripts for the creation of SPM documents expressed in RDF from the TaxonX documents. The RDF files will be mounted on the Plazi web server for harvesting by SPM aware agents, particularly those to be created by the EOL project. SPM data will be served through TAPIR.

This work will be done in close cooperation with GBIF and will engage the wider community through use of the SPM wiki site (http://wiki.tdwg.org/SPM) and mailing list (tdwg-spm-owner@lists.tdwg.org) hosted by TDWG. Other parties will be assisted in exposing species data contained in literature through documenting the process of using the freely accessible GoldenGate tools to provide SPM encoded data. The results of the project will also be presented in the SPM session at the TDWG 2008 conference.

If you are interested in participating in developments around SPM, please join the TDWG SPM mailing list (tdwg-spm@lists.tdwg.org) and keep an eye on the SPM wiki (http://wiki.tdwg.org/SPM/).

Best regards,

Éamonn

-- Éamonn Ó Tuama, Ms.C., Ph.D. (eotuama@gbif.org), Senior Programme Officer - Inventory, Discover, Access (IDA), Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100, Copenhagen Ø, DENMARK

Phone: +45 3532 1494; Fax: +45 3532 1480

Lee Belbin TDWG Secretariat