TAXONOMIC DATABASES WORKING GROUP
17th
Annual Meeting
9 –
11 November, 2001
Friday, 9th November – Australian Museum
Professor Michael Archer, Director of the Australian Museum, welcomed everyone to the meeting and thanked them for travelling in the difficult circumstances. After introducing the museum, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year, Mike talked about the vast diversity of organisms, and how little is actually known. He said that Australia has more diversity than most, but that there is no national collection, so they are aiming at a virtual museum. This is where he thought TDWG was important, and was very pleased that Australia was a part of it.
The first speaker was due to have been Rob Atkinson, but he had been delayed so Tim Entwisle, from Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, started proceedings with his talk on Australia’s Virtual Herbarium. See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/TimEntwisle.htm . Tim said that political lobbying had been important in this project – they had seized the opportunity to bring eight distributed collections together through a portal on the web. There were six million specimens available, 40% of which were databased. They used the HISPID standard for data exchange, and were not allowing some technical issues stopping them from proceeding. In 2000, some governmental ministers became interested in the project, and they have also secured interest from industry and private foundations. AUS $10 million will be spent on the project over 5 years, and the aim is to capture new data as well as validate older data. There are conflicting taxonomies within the existing data, but the project is working towards a national consensus to give the needed “preferred” name. In such a project, communication is very important and the challenge for the future will be to maintain the interest in the project, to see it towards completion.
Another change to the program saw Alex Chapman, from Western Australian Herbarium, Perth, speak next on “Directions for the structure of taxonomic descriptive data”. See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/AlexChapman.htm . Alex said that computer aided taxonomy had really begun in the 70’s with DELTA. Usually, it was a single developer for a project, for a single taxonomic group, but now that was most definitely changing, as people want to combine data and work together. DELTA is an aging standard and enhancements are required, to allow e.g. relational database structure. Work in other fields show what can be done e.g. STAR – Structure Text Archive descriptive standard in crystallographic databasing & publication. Work on smart data dictionaries, active knowledge bases and transferring data from STAR to XML are all important, as are the use of open standards and the use of a collaborative development environment (e.g. SourceForge). Alex finished by saying that standards needed to be distinct from any particular software, and that required enhancements needed to be built into existing standards to provide a migration path /backwards compatibility.
Arthur Chapman, from Environment Australia, followed his namesake, with his talk: “A user’s perspective: Database of the environmental decision support system for the Australian Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act”. See the site at http://www.ea.gov.au/index.html and his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/ArthurChapman.htm . He explained how the Australian Environment Protection & Biodiversity Conservation Act brought several former Acts into one. Additions to the Act included the specification of “significant places”, and species that need special consideration when developing new buildings etc. A database has been developed which developers can use to find out the pertinent information for their proposed area of development. This includes maps of distribution of species, but this information does not go out to the public. The Species Profile and Threats database (SPRAT) will provide some information to the public, but only after editing.
Richard Pankhurst, Edinburgh Royal Botanic Garden, started the second session of the morning with his talk “Standardisation of plant descriptive data obtained by computerised analysis of text” - see the abstract at
http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Pankhurst1.
Richard has been trying to analyse the descriptive data stored in floras, and a test with the flora of Britain results in upto 400 characters being required. By being able to extract plant descriptions into database tables, it is hoped that it will be possible to prepare standardised
descriptions much more rapidly.
Junko Shimura, from the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, described “A Natural History Collection Data Development Kit aided by the Species 2000 Annual Checklist CD-ROM”. See her presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/junko.htm . She discussed the problems with different languages being used in different data sets. For this kit, they used Access 2000, and were able to translate multilingual character sets.
Guillaume Rousse, from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, presented “OSIS, an object model for systematics”. This can be seen at http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/~rousse/recherche/TDWG2001/index.html . He asked why another model was needed? His answer was that generally the existing models were either closely related to a dedicated task (exchange, persistence), and/or to a dedicated implementation (relational database), thus were not generic. With OSIS, Guillaume proposes an alternative approach, with a single multi-purpose, abstract data model, and several task-dedicated implementations. Additionally, it explores object-oriented modelling ability to overcome other limitations, such as dynamic world representation, modular design, and complex data structure support. Technical choices focus on cross-platform technologies, use of open standards and free software to promote interoperability, software independence and cooperative development.
The final morning session was presented by Alan Brooks, from KE Software in Australia, on KE Emu. See http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/AlanBrooks.htm for his presentation.
This is an electronic museum management system, providing solutions for Museums, Botanic Gardens and Herbaria, Art Galleries and Historical Societies. It incorporates a configurable catalogue, and multiple disciplines can be supported with their own distinct fields. It is Dublin Core compliant, and works on Windows systems. The database engine has been developed over many years, and is designed to handle large textual collections.
Li Mingguang, from Zhongshan University in China, started the afternoon session by talking about “Biological data sharing in China”. The abstract is available at
http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Li1 . He said that for many years, China had been lagging behind on computer systems and the internet. But now, there was a concentrated effort to make the vast amount of data available electronically, by digitising data. It was also now a policy of the government to establish a nationwide distributed database system, and to collaborate with the “outside” world.
Rob Atkinson, Technical Director at Social Change Online in Sydney, spoke about “The role of external standards”. See http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/role_of_standards.htm .
(This talk was due to have been the initial presentation for the meeting, but Rob had been delayed.) He talked about the different kinds of standards: level of prescriptive (e.g. advisory); function (e.g. interface standard); and type of developmental process (e.g. de facto). He reminded TDWG that there should be clean separation between the types, and we should be explicit and comfortable about who owns each piece. He talked about standards in geographic data – the ISO 19000 series, and the Geography Markup Language (GML).
Bob Morris, from University of Massachusetts, described “XML Architecture for automated database-backed descriptive species pages: A general tool for biologists to make field guides of any group of taxa”. See his presentation at http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/tdwg2001/tdwg2001.ppt . He explained that they had built a field guide generator, not the field guide itself. The author can provide data in any database format that supports ODBC, or in XML for data of more complex structure than is supported by the relational data model. Queries return XML, but if a suitable style sheet is specified, this can produce HTML either at our server, that of a third party, or at the client if it can interpret XSLT.
The final session of the first day was started by Bryan Heidorn,
from the University of Illinois, who talked about “Taxonomic description
creation, search and display in XML”. See his paper at http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~pheidorn/papers/TDWG2001Heidorn2.pps.
He described a project that involved structuring conventional text – converting Flora North America to structured XML, to give searching capabilities and retrieval units of family to species. Maps and images also had to be related to the data, and there could be multiple species related to one image. Swish-ex software was used to create a structured index of the marked up files, to help with searching. An XML query interface was created, and the search results were displayed in html, using XSL style sheets.
Steve Shattuck described “New tools for managing taxon- and specimen-based morphological data” - see the abstract at http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Shattuck2 .
Scientists face the daunting task of discovering and describing an estimated 8,500,000 species of plants and animals, so tools that enhance the productivity of taxonomists and provide the results of their work in dynamic and customizable formats will be of great benefit. But there are many problems with the existing tools, and to make tools work with older software is very restrictive so backward compatibility will not be an aim. The work being undertaken by CSIRO Entomology (Canberra) and the Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia) builds on the foundation provided by DELTA (a TDWG standard) by developing new and more general tools and extensions that are not currently available.
See www.biolink.csiro.au for further information.
Philip Gleeson, from National Parks & Wildlife Service, Australia presented “The NSW Biodiversity Information Network Demonstrator: A prototype built using OpenGIS standards.” See http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/Gleeson_Talk1.htm and http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/Gleeson_Talk2.htm for the presentation. Philip described how it was difficult to get biodiversity information as it was held by many different government agencies, and this meant that planning was often difficult. He went on to talk about a pilot study aimed at improving access to biodiversity information in NSW, by allowing access to the distributed databases of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and the Australian Museum using Master Lists of Names for NSW species maintained by the Royal Botanic Gardens and the
Australian Museum. Queries and responses were coded in XML according to a schema based on the OpenGIS Web Feature Server specification that makes use of Geography Markup Language (GML) to encode references to spatial data.
Paul Flemons, from the Australian Museum, presented “FaunaNet – An example of a web-based collection mapping application.” See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/PaulFlemons.htm . Faunanet is a web mapping application that seeks to provide the public with information on the fauna of NSW, including maps of their distribution. It allows the Australian Museum collections to be queried using names selected from the NSW Master Names List (MNL), maintained by the Australian Museum. Queries can be made using either the scientific or common name. There were many technical issues which surfaced during the project, since there were 8 databases on 5 different servers, and security was a big issue as queries were being made on the live databases.
The final presentation of the day was made by Stan Blum, from the California Academy of Science, on “A graphical tool for geo-referencing collecting localities.” The abstract is at http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Blum1 with further information available at http://www.calacademy.org/research/informatics/georef . Stan described how they have developed a geo-referencing tool, based on ArcView 3.2, that enables a user to draw localities on a digital map. A feature of the tools that improves the efficiency and accuracy of manual mapping is the ability to represent a locality as a circle, a simple irregular polygon, or a buffered poly-line. Representing a locality as an arbitrary two-dimensional shape improves accuracy because the user is not constrained by a potentially inappropriate geometry, such as a circle or bounding box. It can also decrease processing time because users do not spend time optimizing the size and position of inappropriate geometries.
Saturday, 10th November – Royal Botanic Gardens
Jim Croft, outgoing chairman, started the second day of the meeting with the TDWG Business session. In his report, Jim said that the TDWG year had been reasonably successful, with aims and products showing increasing maturity. He had been involved with TDWG since the 1990 meeting in Delphi, associated with the Global Plant Species Information System (GPSIS), and the ideals of that meeting are still going. Before that, people had been working in isolation, but this is quite different now.
Jim talked about the changes in focus – at Delphi, everyone was showing off their wonderful databases, but the presentations were not at all technical. This trend continued in Canberra, but there was the recognition of the need for electronic files. In Mexico, the first entity-relationship diagrams made their appearance, with Walter Berendsohn proudly presenting a model, and everyone else taking one out of their pocket too! Then came the world wide web years, through to Reading where geospatial needs (dots on maps) were raised. At Frankfurt, the emphasis changed again, to linking databases, and digital images. In Sydney, Jim felt there was a new level of sophistication, and a clarification of purpose. Linking of databases, with viewing through portals was very much in evidence, and “dots on maps” had been replaced by representation by shapes, leading to increased accuracy and precision in online GIS. He felt that the talk given by Rob Atkinson on standards was a very important paper since it provided a context into which TDWG could continue standards development.
Jim went on to explain that the TDWG year had been productive since membership had increased, finances were good, and there had been significant activity in subgroups. And he was very pleased with the attendance at the meeting, especially given the world situation after the terrorist attacks on September 11th.
Georgina MacKenzie presented her secretary’s report – see http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/secrep2001.htm . The meeting accepted the secretary’s report, and thanked her for producing the newsletter, and keeping the website up-to-date.
Walter Berendsohn presented his first treasurer’s report. See http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/TDWG-Treasurer-2001.htm . He reported that there were 24 personal and 25 institutional members who were currently in good standing, which was probably the most there had ever been! But, for once, bills had been sent out when payment was due, and this will continue. The Frankfurt meeting cost DM26000, but DM23100 was raised, and thus even the costs for invited speakers were partially covered. Walter thought that one of the main topics of discussion should be what the money in the account should be used for. A question was raised about putting the list of members up on the web site, but it was felt that members would have to be asked their permission to do this, otherwise European data protection laws may be broken. The treasurer’s report was accepted.
Subgroup reports
SDD subgroup:
Kevin Thiele reported that the SDD list server had been quiet of late, but that the group were hoping interest would be resurrected as a result of meeting again. He felt that email lists were very fragile and needed specific topics to keep going. There was a feeling that a physical meeting was necessary during the year, to keep focus and interest, especially if several people were working on projects independently. Walter commented that he thought the group had mixed aims, and that they needed to separate these (as the Accessions group had done). Bob Morris felt that there were many people working in this area that were not involved with TDWG, so efforts should be made to get involved with them.
Accessions subgroup:
(see http://bgbm3.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/TDWG/CODATA/default.htm )
Walter reported that after many years of little activity, CODATA support had galvanised the process and they had held a workshop in Santa Barbara earlier in the year, and another just before the main TDWG meeting.
The first workshop led to the tasks being split into data definition, and protocol. On the data definition side, Walter reported that Charles Copp had worked on this, funded by EHNSIN. There were hundreds of data items to be treated – to put into the schema, and to pick out parts that are clearly defined, to give proposed standard elements e.g. genus name. Walter thought this might be a proposed standard for the next TDWG meeting. He asked for volunteers willing to comment on the proposal, and hoped to coordinate this using BIOCISE funding.
Stan Blum reported the progress on the protocols effort. He said that it had been influenced by the work of Dave Vieglais and collaborators who have been recasting Z39.50 using XML and HTTP. The All Species Foundation (http://www.all-species.org)
had sent Kurt Bollacker to the Santa Barbara meeting to act as an observer, but he also proved to be a valuable contributor and ended up facilitating the meeting of the protocol subgroup. Kurt had suggested the use of SourceForge to help coordinate work among distributed developers (SourceForge.net provides free services to Open Source developers, including project hosting, version control, bug and issue tracking, project management, backups and archives, and communication and collaboration resources). In the months since Santa Barbara, the suggestion was followed and a project established ( see http://digir.sourceforge.net/ ). The Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) project is intended to be an open source reference implementation for the distributed query protocol. A design objective in the current work is to make the protocol, the software that implements the protocol, and the semantics data retrieved as independent as possible.
This led to a discussion about the mounting of web material on the TDWG web site, and about storage, which led to the possibility of using some of the funds to get system management to maintain the web site. Walter was concerned about the use of other sites as addresses had a habit of disappearing. Stan countered that it takes a fair amount of effort to provide the collaboration facilities that are available at SourceForge and that active and useful sites may move, but they don’t disappear.
Spatial data subgroup:
Reed Beaman reported that the group met for the first time at last year’s meeting and unfortunately not a lot had happened since. However, they viewed themselves as an advisory group and didn’t aim to produce standards. He said that there was still an interest, and that the group would be meeting during this meeting. They would look at subsets of spatial standards that are particularly important to biological data.
Geography subgroup:
Neil Brummitt reported that he had taken over since the publication of the 2nd Edition. He hoped the good work would continue, and thought that the role of the standard needed to be extended to cope with zoology and marine zones. To do this, new expertise was needed in the group. See http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/brummit.htm for further details.
Stan Blum thought that there could be a good example of how standards relate to each other, if this group worked with the Spatial Data subgroup.
Names subgroup:
The convenor Frank Bisby was not present at the meeting, and there was some confusion over whether the subgroup still existed. After some discussion, it was felt that there was a need for an extended names standard – the accessions group may need to do some work on this matter.
Economic Botany subgroup:
The convenor, Daphne Christopher, could not attend the meeting, but hoped that the subgroup could meet at the Society for Economic Botany’s annual conference in 2002 in New York Botanical Gardens.
Jim Croft continued the business meeting saying that the Election of Officers would be carried out the following day, and that a committee of Jill Appel, Karen Wilson and Gregor Hagedorn had been charged with canvassing the members to come up with proposals for executive committee members. He commented that the executive was missing members from Africa and Latin America, and this needed attention. Barry Conn asked what the regional secretaries were expected to do – Stan Blum replied that the idea of a regional secretary was to represent TDWG in the area, and to provide information on what is going on in the region. Bob Morris asked if TDWG had a role to go out and tell people about bioinformatics? Walter Berendsohn said that this really came down to funding, and perhaps TDWG should ask GBIF for support in this – and if TDWG was serious about it, all members should talk to their national representatives about it.
Jim asked if there was any new business – Bob Morris asked if TDWG should stand for Taxonomic Data Work Group, as database was a means to an end. There was some discussion about whether the name should still include taxonomic. It was felt that this would be a topic of a future meeting.
Venue & Date of next meeting – Jim said that it was in everyone’s interests if this was finalised as soon as possible. Stan would be organising the next meeting, and he talked about the possibility of holding it in Costa Rica, with the help of INBIO. Arthur Chapman reported that Vanderlie Canhos’s team in Campinas, Brazil were keen to host the meeting. This discussion was carried over to the following day.
Stan Blum led some discussion about the set up of TDWG – how various subgroups were set up, usually with the aim of producing a “standard” through a process of group discussion, leading to specification, followed by review, then acceptance of the group at large. This process took a long time, and with the help of Rob Atkinson, Stan hoped to review this process and come up with a more streamlined process. There was a general consensus that a framework is needed to guide TDWG’s standards development efforts.
The Executive would work on revising the process, which would involve rewriting the bye-laws in the Constitution. And Jim Croft would convene a working group to produce a new framework for standards – it was suggested that this should consist of the existing group convenors and the area secretaries.
The afternoon session began with a presentation by Mike Choo from West Australian Herbarium, Perth, on the “Integration of taxonomic descriptive data across multiple database platforms and softwares (WIN – a case study)”. See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/choo.htm . Mike described how this involved an automated mechanism for extracting DELTA formatted data from non-DELTA sources, then merging them. The latter stage was dealt with by DELIA – DELTA Integrator, which also provides integration across software since it allows integration with Intkey and CONFOR data.
Jim Croft then described the “Online Flora of Australia Pteridophytes: an information model for an electronic Flora using XML”. See the abstract at http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Croft1 .
The text and image information from a couple of published floras was converted from its word-processor format to a structured XML data file and loaded into an Oracle relational database from where it can be exported entirely or in part in response to standard database queries. The internet gateway to the database allows fields of flora information to be delivered to standard browsers and other devices in XML and HTML formats in a vast range of definable styles. And because published floras have a lot in common, it is thought only minor adjustments would be needed to the Flora of Australia data structure to enable it to used for other Flora projects.
Richard Pankhurst talked about “Literature standards for taxonomic botany”. He reminded the meeting that there were two TDWG standards in this area – TL2 and BPH. See http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Pankhurst2
for the abstract. TL2 – the standard refers to the book, but Richard wondered if it should be the related database. He said that it did need updating and improving e.g. abbreviations needed standardising, and it would be a good task for automating.
BPH also needs updating. Jim Croft asked if Richard thought the standard should refer to the database instead of the book, but Richard replied that the quality wasn’t yet good enough. Richard thought that the use of reference managers might be helpful but there would be problems connecting them to the database.
The rest of the afternoon of the second day of the meeting was given over to working group discussion sessions.
Sunday 11th November – Royal Botanic
Gardens
The final day of the meeting began with a talk by Piotr Naskreki on “Overcoming taxonomic bottlenecks: Digital type specimen catalogs”. See the abstract at http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Naskrecki1.
They focussed on building a database of type specimens because one of the most serious bottlenecks in the efforts to describe the world's biodiversity is the need to identify species that are already known and separate them from those that are new and in many cases, this is hindered by the necessity to examine type specimens because the original descriptions are frequently inadequate for positive identification. This procedure is both costly and time consuming. Digital imagining technology, combined with the ease and speed of distributing data over the Internet and other media, brings a promise of change to this scenario. Type specimens can now be photographed in great detail using relatively inexpensive equipment and instantly made available to the scientific community worldwide.
Adrian Rissone from the Natural History Museum in London talked about “Collections database for Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, London”. See his abstract at http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/bioforum/TDWG_program/tdwg_abstracts.html#Rissone1.
Adrian said they wanted to build a system for curators to use, not systems people. There were some problems getting data into the new database, but this was simplified by a data transfer system which enabled drag and drop from old system to new. He said that they soon learned that they did not have an adequate enough specification, as they had started the project in a bit of a rush. One of the main lessons they learned was that project management is very important.
Nicolas Bailly, from Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, talked about “Fauna Europaea: Ongoing efforts on IT development”. See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/bailly.htm . Nicolas described this project that had the aim of creating a public web site of scientifically accepted names. The initial target was 100,000 names, but the current estimate is 150,000. There is some semi-automatic comparison of existing world lists through the LITCHI project (see http://www.litchi.biol.soton.ac.uk/ ). Further challenges include working with international initiatives such as GBIF, GTI, Sp2000 and EHNSIN.
Walter Berendsohn, from BGBM in Berlin, followed on by talking about “EHNSIN and BioCASE – Access to European Collections”. See his presentation at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/Berendsohn.pdf . Walter said that these European projects were, of course, of worldwide interest, because of the presence of so many historic and modern non-European specimens in European museums. They would be feeding into the European Network for Biodiversity Information, ENBI. Walter stated that one of the aspects that really needs looking into is how to fund these services once the projects end. Another is addressing the legal issues of charging for information. The CODATA/TDWG working group on access to biological collections data (see http://www.bgbm.org/tdwg/codata/) is very important to these initiatives.
The final session of the main TDWG meeting included reports from the working groups on their discussions held during the meeting, and a final business session.
Accessions - Walter announced the change of name to biological collections data working group.
Stan reported that they had been discussing the functional requirements of the protocol. He thought they were feeling confident that most requirements will be covered by the first implementation, and said that they were on track but it was still very early days. He sensed lots of enthusiasm about it, and welcomed new participants in the project, whether as reviewers or developers.
Geography – Neil Brummitt reported that the next stage was to extend the scope of the standard to include marine regions. To do this, they needed to talk to people working in these areas, and he had been offered advice on contacts during this meeting. He thought there were many ways to go forward, and would present how they were going to go about it by next year. To follow up on Stan’s suggestion about coordination with the spatial data subgroup, Neil was now in that subgroup. And at Walter’s suggestion, Neil would talk to Nicolas Bailly about how they used the standard in Fauna Europaea. He would also attempt to recruit zoologists onto the subgroup, by talking to OBIS (see http://marine.rutgers.edu/OBIS/ ) , Fishbase (see http://www.fishbase.org/home.htm ) and the British Oceanic Survey, among others.
See his report at http://www.tdwg.org/2001meet/SydneyGeog.htm .
SDD – Gregor reported that they discussed a minimum requirements set which would form the boundary for future requirements. They will explore whether there should be several subsets of the standard, and will attempt to coordinate with other schemas and standards (TDWG, W3C, etc). They aim to have clearly organised documents collected to web pages, and will possibly use a discussion list. They felt that they wanted to organise all their ideas and analyse them. So far, a problem had been lack of examples. And they hope to organise a workshop in advance of the GBIF/Sp2000 meeting in Canberra in March.
Spatial Data – Reed Beaman reported that the group, in their advisory capacity, would produce a list of recommendation and actions for next year. He said that they would have their own discussion forum, but would cross post to other groups e.g. Biological Collections. They favoured GML for handling spatial data (although there were some reservations about the way it handled time).. They will discuss best practices for handling spatial data, and look at how spatial data is linked to other groups.
Descriptive Data Standard - Richard Pankhurst said that although this group had been dormant for a few years, there did now seem a need for it. Walter suggested that a starting point would be the two standards Richard had discussed on the previous day. Karen Wilson said that this topic would certainly be discussed further in the SPP meeting following TDWG. She mentioned BIBMaster software developed in Madrid to handle bibliographic data. Jim Croft said that it would be good if this group linked up the with SDD group.
TDWG Process – Stan said he would post questions on the TDWG mailing list to get opinions on the critical issues of voting, standards, organisation and would draft a document for comment. He also promised to harass Jim Croft to talk about development of the framework for standards!
Jim said he would prepare a document summarising the status of the current standards and working groups and post it on the web site.
Final Business Session:
After informally canvassing the meeting attendees, the “electoral committee” announced the proposed slate for the Executive Committee of
Chair – Stan Blum
Secretary – Georgina MacKenzie
Treasurer – Walter Berendsohn
Asia Secretary – Li Mingguang
Oceania Secretary – Alex Chapman
North America Secretary – Gerald “Stinger” Guala
with Africa and Latin America secretaries still to be found.
This was accepted by public vote, and the new Executive was asked to find representatives for the missing regions. Stinger reported he had some suggestions, but that funds might need to be used to get attendees from South Africa.
It was suggested that TDWG should recruit from other areas, including conservation and ecological database producers. Bob Morris said that outreach was very important. Karen Wilson mentioned CODATA, who were concerned with standards across all disciplines, wanted to get more involved with biology. There was enthusiasm for TDWG really pushing to get a role in GBIF, but products really needed to be delivered.
Jim Croft felt that the number of zoologists involved still needed to be increased, but Nicolas Bailly said the problem was the dispersion of the zoological community as a whole – there was no one point to spread the announcement of TDWG. He suggested that perhaps the focus could be on existing projects, to make sure they knew of TDWG.
Stan suggested that if TDWG framed its work more clearly, the relationships between disciplines would be easier to see. This in turn would foster collaboration among disciplines.
Jim said that handling of multi-lingual data also needed to be looked at. Adrian Rissone volunteered to convene a working group to discuss non-ASCII characters in databases.
Jim said he would finish his tasks as chairman by thanking Karen Wilson and the organising committee for their efforts, and the speakers for presenting, to make the 2001 meeting of TDWG a success! He handed over to the new chairman, and Stan returned to the topic of the next meeting. He reported that there seemed to be 3 current options – Costa Rica, Campinas in Brazil, or San Fransicso, and he hoped it would be solidified within 6 weeks. Stan also suggested that we look at options for the following year – perhaps South Africa, and Stinger would look into options. Li Mingguang offered for the 2003 meeting to be held in China. Stan thanked him for his offer, saying it would certainly be considered. He then formally closed the 17th annual meeting of TDWG.
GMM 24/01/02