Lee Attends IUCN-OASIS Workshop on Biodiversity Standards

By: Lee Belbin

Lee Belbin represented TDWG Executive Committee at the IUCN-OASIS workshop on Biodiversity Standards help at the IUCN in Gland Switzerland April 18 and 19, 2007.

The IUCN has been discussing the requirement for developing standards for handling their biodiversity data with OASIS. The workshop was a first meeting of interested parties to see what first steps could be established. Among invitees, were GBIF, represented by Éamonn O Tuama and Lee.

It was recognized by IUCN and OASIS that TDWG standards were a necessary part of solving IUCN's standardization issues.

Lee presented on TDWG and the common development architecture; the latter as an effective framework for the development of a set of vocabularies/ontology relating directly to IUCN's expertise on species and area status.

Éamonn raised the concept of the Universal Biodiversity Data Bus (based on TDWG standards) and reported on the meeting at GBIF (April 16-17) on species pages. It is likely that the advances from this meeting will assist the IUCN with the steps for building the required standards.

The report of the meeting can be found here. Further information can be obtained from lee(at)tdwg(dot)org.

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