Dear all,
As was discussed previously (on the list and in Bratislava) we plan to have a meeting 14-16 November. At this time, I am working on a budget for a meeting in St Louis. I am also looking at options for including those who cannot make it to St Louis (due to time constraints) for electronic conferencing.
*
Skype can handle up to nine connections in a conference call, and only handle 2 in a video conference.
*
I have access to a Webex account that will allow for shared desktops (that can be moved around among various people--either control of the mouse on a remote screen, or the desktop being used).
*
VRVS (http://www.vrvs.org/) appears to be another option for video/phone conferencing and desktop sharing. If you are interested in participating remotely, take a look at the quick tour at the top of the page and see if you will be able to use this.
Please let me know ASAP if (a) you want to participate electronically and if you think VRVS will work for you. Arturo Ariño will be testing the VRVS shortly. As a fallback, I suggest we go with Webex & Skype (we may be able to patch some people from a Skype conference into the Webex conference so those who are overseas can avoid the call charges--I will test this).
Remember, the meeting will take place during the day in US Central Standard Time (UTC/GMT -6 hours), so if you want to participate electronically, you will need to be prepared for our hours (or overlapping with some as best you can).
At the current time, there are only a few people who have expressed firm interest in attending the conference in person:
*
Anna Weitzman
*
Chris Lyal
*
Terry Catapano
*
Donat Agosti
*
Chris Freeland
*
Chuck Miller
If your name is not on that list, and you would like to attend, please let me know ASAP, so I can include your costs in the budget. Conversely, if you are on the list and will not be able to attend, please also let me know.
I need to finalize the budget for this within a week, so please let me know if and how you want to be included ASAP!
Thanks & best regards,
Anna
Anna L. Weitzman, PhD
Botanical and Biodiversity Informatics Research
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
office: 202.633.0846
mobile: 202.415.4684
weitzman(a)si.edu
Hi all,
I'm new to this list and hope that the following are appropriate questions.
In Bratislava, I wasn't keeping detailed enough notes on projects and their
current and future plans wrt TCS.
What sites are currently publishing TCS-formatted data or will be within
the year? I know that zoobank.org will be publishing TCS data in the near
future. Is GBIF? ITIS? Species2000?
What sites are publishing real "taxon concept" data (in TCS format or not)?
Conversely, what sites are simply publishing "nominal taxon concepts" as
opposed to detailed authoritative taxon concepts?
Is this the kind of thing for which we should generate a survey to send to
sites (i.e. their plans for publishing TCS) or distrubute to TDWG members?
Thanks,
Paul
------------------------
Paul Allen, Assistant Director
Information Science pea1(a)cornell.edu
Cornell Lab of Ornithology (800) 843-BIRD
159 Sapsucker Woods Road (607) 254-2480 (direct)
Ithaca, NY 14850 (607) 254-2415 (fax)
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/http://www.ebird.org/http://bird.atlasing.org/
------------------------
Dear All,
I thought I would chip in and say that the two CATE websites are
resolving LSIDs for taxon concepts, and returning metadata typed according
to http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept. Their urls are
http://www.cate-araceae.org which is a web-revision of the Araceae (Arums
and relatives) and http://www.cate-sphingidae.org which is a web-revision of
the Sphingidae (Hawkmoths). In each case, we're returing the concept sensu
the web-revision, rather than a paper publication, which means that it is
the name as used by the editorial boards of the websites and published on
the pages of the website. It is the intention to extend this group through
the addition of an open peer-review process (see
http://www.cate-project.org).
At the moment, we're only returning taxon concepts, name strings, a link to
the taxon page on the website, and taxonomic relationships to other taxon
concepts (child taxa and synonyms). The Araceae site also returns IPNI lsids
where we've been able to match the name to a name in IPNI. We'd like to do
the same for the sphingids if an authority for sphingid names becomes
available. We've got lots of descriptive information as well, and I expect
that we'll use the SPM to make that available eventually.
Cheers,
Ben
