TDWG – Looking Backward and Forward

1. TDWG – Looking Backward and Forward Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia 20 October 2008

2. TDWG – Looking backward • Developing biodiversity information standards since 1985 • Changing focus: • Phase 1: Data models for institutional collections • Developing shared understanding of the information domain • Phase 2: Web-based data exchange (DiGIR, Darwin Core, etc.) • Building dedicated networks for merging data • Phase 3: Ontologies, flexible data integration • Liberating biodiversity data for wider use • TDWG currently still between phase 2 and phase 3 • Important to retain benefits from earlier phases: • Strong involvement from collection and biological community • Focus on understanding and modelling the information domain • Important to apply expertise to the modern web • Models for reuse in many contexts • Support for intelligent harvesting and integration of data

3. TDWG – Revitalise working groups • Declining focus on working group meetings • Formerly much more central to annual conference • In 2005-2007 meetings funded outside conference • Conference now largely filled with presentations • Less opportunity to develop standards • Less opportunity to cross-fertilise ideas • Proposals: • Include working sessions back in main conference days • Seek priorities from major projects and user groups • What problems should TDWG address most urgently? • Seek sponsors for TDWG Task Group meetings • Co-brand standards activities with partners • Urgent need for volunteers • Active contributors to groups • Chair for Technical Architecture Group • Leaders for work on LSIDs and on ontology

4. TDWG – Separation of concerns • TDWG based on linking biologists and software engineers • In recent years focus on solving some IT issues: • Overall architecture for biodiversity data • Globally unique identifiers • Change of focus from XML schema to RDF equivalents • Risk of alienating biologists and other users • All too technical • Need to maintain balance and vitality • Use architecture and ontology to separate concerns • Biologists can model what data should be captured and exchanged • Software engineers can apply these data models in different contexts • Enable us all to contribute in our own areas of expertise • TDWG should be the meeting place where this happens

5. TDWG – Simplifying recommendations • TDWG has learned a lot in the last 10 years • We have developed a series of versions of different standards • DiGIR, BioCASe, TAPIR • Darwin Core (several versions), ABCD, TaxonOccurrence vocabulary • Taxon Concept Schema, TaxonName and TaxonConcept vocabularies • Etc. • Very confusing to users • Often standards are superseded before they are even ratified • Previous versions have not been deprecated • Uncompleted move to the ontology and vocabularies • See the ALA guidelines: http://www.ala.org.au/datastandards.htm • Challenge: move to clear and consistent recommendations: • 2009: complete the core ontology and vocabularies • 2010: move to a single set of recommended standards

6. TDWG – Outreach to biologists and users • TDWG still unknown to many potential user groups • Challenge for all TDWG members • Publicise TDWG standards where they are applicable • Identify issues TDWG standards haven’t addressed • Recommend topics for TDWG Conference in 2009 • Use TDWG infrastructure resources • Biodiversity Information Projects of the World • Biodiversity Information Networks Database • Biodiversity Information Events Database • Interest Group and Task Group wikis • Wonderful to see such a wide spread of attendees this year • Work together to make TDWG standards solve real problems

7. An example - taxonomy tags

8. Thank you Donald Hobern Chair, Taxonomic Databases Working Group Director, Atlas of Living Australia Phone: (02) 6246 4352 Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au Web: http://www.ala.org.au/