TDWG Annual Conference 2009

From NeOn Project

Two days of plenary sessions and three days of working groups to discuss standards related to biodiversity information: this was the 2009 Annual Conference of the Biodiversity Informatics Standards, formerly Taxonomic Database Working Group (hence the acronym that continues to be used: TDWG). The theme of this year's conference was "data integration". In fact, in order to pass data around, standards and agreed vocabularies are essential, and TDWG is the organization that set up those standards in the area of biology and related science.

But why are standards so important in natural science? As many natural science museums are digitizing their collections of specimen descriptions, there is a need to adopt standard formats from the outset. Also, as taxonomists' work presupposes that several sources of information and classified specimens are compared, it is important that there be agreement in the format and structure used in these data sets. Finally, gene banks also need to specify the genetic features they store and the vocabulary used for their description.

Vocabularies and more complex data structures are fundamental in all the above cases. For this reason, the TDWG community first developed the Darwin Core, a metadata format inspired by the principles of the Dublin Core and originally oriented to the description of specimens (the Darwin Core is now being consolidated and several extensions have been proposed). Recently, TDWG has also started working on a "TDWG ontology": something more ambitious than a vocabulary such as the Darwin Core, as it aims to define a common model for the domain. The experience reported from NeOn was appreciated as a contribution towards a TDWG ontology, in particular, the following areas were of special interest to the people present: the idea of a linguistic model in order to have uniform management of scientific names; the idea of design patterns to facilitate domain experts to only concentrate on the domain modelling (as opposed to the part involving formal logic); the tools made available by NeOn to the community; the experience gained in ontology mapping (especially relevant to the cross-taxonomy problem); and the experience gained with the use case on fisheries. Several people expressed some interest in having a closer collaboration between the community of semantically-oriented tools and the TDWG community. Also, several other ontology-related initiatives were presented, including in the area of crop and genetic resources. There is a wider level of awareness regarding the importance of RDF as the bottom layer to assist data integration, to be used together with higher level ontologies.

Among the conclusions of the conference, it was agreed that a common repository of scenarios and use cases will be developed which could also facilitate interaction between the communities of computer scientists and natural scientists.

All conference presentations are available online.

Story by Caterina Caracciolo