Taxonomic Databases Working Group
2005 Annual Meeting
11-18 September 2005
St Petersburg, Russia

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15 September Minutes of 2004 Meeting posted Please follow the link "2004 Minutes " in the Menu.

TDWG 2005
Biodiversity Informatics - Enhancing the Taxonomic Work Process

Taxonomy is at the core of the biological subdisciplines involved in biodiversity informatics. Some progress has been made to network taxonomic resources with respect to specimen and taxon information, the most notable outcome being the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF. Networks provide access to individual institutional resources or to the output from such resources and thus ease information discovery and provision for taxonomists and research institutes.

With the ongoing loss of species and habitats, taxonomy faces an enormous challenge. As a result, institutions increasingly co-operate and funding bodies are starting to react. The efficiency of taxonomy in classifying and identifying organisms must be increased significantly to cope with the situation. One of the major impediments to full usage of the existing taxonomic research potential is the lack of a common and networked platform for taxonomic work processes such as taxonomic revisions, biodiversity inventories, effective identification, and methodologically broad-based phylogenetic research.

True to its name, the Taxonomic Databases Working Group is addressing the subject by developing the underlying standards necessary for this research platform. In addition, annual meetings have traditionally been used to demonstrate the state of the art in biodiversity informatics in general. This years meeting will continue to do so, and participants are invited to demonstrate their activities by means of computer demonstrations, posters and by participating in the working groups and plenary discussions.

The core and unifying subject of the symposium within the meeting will be the taxonomic work process, the identification of existing components, and ways in which these can be assembled into a highly adaptable, user friendly and efficient platform for taxonomic information production. Session subjects will be adapted to the contributions received; we hope to cover all aspects of the process, from information access (collections, bibliography, geography, ...), and processing (description, nomenclature, images, phyologenenies), to the product (monographs, checklists, "unitary taxonomomy" pages, etc.).

Symposium topics are expected to include:

• Modelling the taxomic work process (process modelling, information flows, etc.)
• Metadata systems supporting taxonomy (GTI: collections, experts, projects)
• Informatics tools for species inventories and monitoring
• Informatics tools for the delimitation of taxa
• External resources for taxonomy (bibliography, geography)
• Publication of results (open access platforms, publishers, Species Bank)
• Collaborative tools for research groups doing taxonomic revisions
• Tools for the improvement of data quality and their application (provider/portal-sided applications)
• Publishing biodiversity content
• Priority biodiversity data standards for the taxonomic work process
• Biodiversity Informatics for taxonomic research in Russia

Walter Berendsohn
Chair
June 2005

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