[tdwg] Literature Interest Group approved

[Weitzman, Anna]

The Literature Interest Group and Charter has now been approved by the
TDWG Executive.  The group's web site is at:
http://www.tdwg.org/activities/literature/.  A brief description of the
goals of the group follows below.  More information is available in the
charter and on the Wiki.  Please join the mailing list using the link on
that web page if you are interested.  

 

The group will hold a meeting on Sunday, 16 September 2007 from
2:30-5:00 pm in Bratislava.  The meeting will be held at the Faculty of
Science.  Please contact me for directions, maps and details if you plan
to attend.

 


Summary


Due to the international calls for greater availability of biodiversity
data, an increasing number of institutions, especially the Biodiversity
Heritage Library project (BHL) are digitising taxonomic literature and
making these materials freely available on the World Wide Web. Most of
the digitally available literature is in the form of image files and to
a lesser extent, text files generated, sometimes very imperfectly, using
optical character recognition (OCR). These are the two forms planned by
the BHL. In a few cases text or metadata are searchable, but those are
idiosyncratically formatted, marked up or split into fields. 

An increasing number of institutions, publishers and funding bodies are
however showing interest in making full text of portions of the
taxonomic literature available. Having standards in place will
facilitate their work and encourage them to make the literature data
interoperable with other pertinent data. 


Becoming Involved


The Literature group welcomes participation from all interested parties
with biological, library, and publishing backgrounds. Members of the
group are interested in standards and technologies for analysing
biodiversity data from taxonomic literature and combining them with
knowledge from other biodiversity data sets. 

Participants in other TDWG groups that work on data included in
taxonomic literature are strongly encouraged to participate. This
participation is vital to ensure the standards are compatible and
interoperable. 

The TDWG process requires that new Task Groups be launched through an
Interest Group. The Literature group can facilitate establishment of new
Task Groups that relate to taxonomic literature standards. 

Please contact the Convener or Core members to discuss potential
projects or join existing Task Groups. 

 

 

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 at si.edu

 

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