News Archive
The New Chairman's Vision for 2008
TDWG has had a very busy year and has achieved a great deal. We owe a particular debt to Lee Belbin, Roger Hyam and Ricardo Pereira for the long hours they have put in to making the TDWG Infrastructure Project a success, but there has also been an amazing number of new and continuing projects that are making use of TDWG products. The TDWG conference in Bratislava provides a good cross-section of the work. The Proceedings of TDWG and the presentations are now available.
I believe that 2008 will be a critical year for us as we start to build new solutions based on all this activity. Major projects such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are expecting to use TDWG standards to build web sites that will dynamically combine a much wider range of biodiversity information than we have seen before.
I see the following key priorities for TDWG in helping to make this possible:
- LSIDs and LSID vocabularies. During 2007, the TDWG Infrastructure Project has supported the introduction of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) for key biodiversity data sets such as IPNI, Index Fungorum, ZooBank and the Catalogue of Life and has promoted the development of a range of tools to support the use of LSIDs. At the same time, we have reworked existing TDWG data standards such as Darwin Core, ABCD and TCS to develop a range of reusable RDF vocabularies. A growing number of LSID implementations has already started using these vocabularies. They also give us a much more flexible set of standards for modelling biodiversity data in other contexts such as TAPIR responses or tagging content in HTML data. LSIDs in combination with these LSID vocabularies represent an exciting step towards making all of our data seamlessly interoperable.
- Species Profile Model. The Species Profile Model (SPM) has been developed as a draft standard to support rapid dynamic integration of any information about any species (or other taxon). It provides a very simple model for organising biodiversity information by taxon, major subject category and language and for sharing this information using TAPIR or any other suitable approach for tagging content. SPM can support projects such as the EoL and ALA. The underlying information may be shared as plain text, or via a URL that identifies a digital resource, or as structured data using XML standards such as SDD or TCS. If SPM is widely adopted, it can serve as the foundation for discovering and accessing biodiversity information between all our projects and networks.
- Metadata standards – TDWG has developed a number of independent approaches to handling metadata describing digital data sets (e.g. as part of the DiGIR protocol and within the ABCD and SDD data standards). Other communities have developed other standards, either highly general (e.g. Dublin Core) or specific to particular communities (ecological data, geospatial data, etc.). There is a critical need for a common metadata model suitable for describing any biodiversity data set. Such a standard should make it easy to select those data sets which are appropriate for a given purpose or application. As well as basic information on provenance, ownership and intellectual property and technical metadata (how to access the data), the metadata standard should document the taxonomic, geographic and temporal scope of the data set and any methods that went into collecting the data. This seems to be a clear area in which TDWG can collaborate with the ecological community – as shown by some of the presentations at this year's annual meeting (see http://www.tdwg.org/proceedings/article/view/245 and http://www.tdwg.org/proceedings/article/view/254). This is an important area for TDWG to address to maximise the usability of all our data.
- Support for data providers – TDWG has invested significant effort in developing tools for sharing data (TAPIR implementations and LSID software) and in documenting these tools, but many potential users still find sharing their data a major technical challenge. We need to find better ways to support new users. The wider TDWG community includes many individual with skills and experience in setting up this software, and a number of projects who need to support their participants. We need to pool our resources to develop a shared support infrastructure for TDWG standards and for associated software, including forums, FAQs and a database of skilled resources.
TDWG is active in many other areas, all of them important, but these seem to me to be ones which require special attention right now. We also need to continue to build up the organisation's membership base and to bring in more people with the enthusiasm and skills that are necessary to drive this work forward. Your ideas and support on this would be appreciated.
It is a very exciting time to be involved in the world of biodiversity informatics and TDWG has a central role to play.
Donald Hobern
Incoming Chairman, TDWG
RSS Feed
