TDWG GeoInteroperability Testbed Pilot Project

By: Lee Belbin

On the 1st week of April a marvelous group of people are meeting together to save the world of standards...

The 1st week of April a group of 7 will meet at CRIA, Brasil, for a week of fast prototyping to test different biodiversity geospatial standards and software. The workshop will test and demonstrate the use of TDWG biodiversity informatics and OGC geospatial standards, by creating and implementing a very simple use case that integrates various existing tools and standards within the TDWG universe.

This workshop is being supported by the TDWG Infrastructure Project

The result of the workshop will be a demonstration of the interoperability and usability of the different standards involved in the experiment. A workflow of chained services will be designed and demonstrated in a web application which integrates existing projects, technologies, and standards. We place a strong emphasis on the use of 'existing' facilities. We want a rapid prototype. We will limit de neaveau developments to to achieve interoperability between the components listed below using a simple web user interface.

Three major components- Taxonomic Object Services (TOS), the Spatial Data Library (SDL) and to a lesser extent, High Performance openModeller web services (HP-OMS) are independent developments that will be assumed to be available as prototypes for the workshop.

Tagging of these data sources and services with LSIDs will be an important component of the envisaged work flow, and will be critical to the operation of the SDL and to enable tracing of the data through the work flow.

The workflow will include:

• Use of taxonomic Name/Concept resolution service with LSIDs.
• Primary data harvesting using WFS(2), TAPIR, and/or DiGIR?
• Visualization of primary data with other Geospatial sources using WMS.
• Discovery of environmental layers using catalog services CSW (4).
• Use of the openModeller Web Service to accomplish a model experiment
• Presentation of the results in a web application using WMS and other OGC standards
• Assignment of LSIDs to analysis outputs

All source code from the workshop will be available as Open Source on the biogeosdi.org trac system and the working prototype will be accessible by the general public.

Invited participants:

Aimee Stewart      - Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas
Dave Vieglais        - Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas
Peter Brewer        - Species 2000 Systems Manager
David Neufeld       - University of Colorado
Bart Meganck        - African Museum of Belgium
Tim Sutton            - CRIA
Javier de la Torre - Imaste-IPS

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