head 1.3; access; symbols; locks; strict; comment @# @; expand @o@; 1.3 date 2010.02.19.23.50.22; author RyanKaldari; state Exp; branches; next 1.2; 1.2 date 2006.10.05.20.43.33; author BobMorris; state Exp; branches; next 1.1; 1.1 date 2006.10.05.19.10.35; author BobMorris; state Exp; branches; next ; desc @none @ 1.3 log @none @ text @%META:TOPICINFO{author="RyanKaldari" date="1266623422" format="1.1" version="1.3"}% %META:TOPICPARENT{name="WebHome"}% ---+ IIG Proposed CHARTER Material to be perhaps incorporated This is a draft proposal for the TDWGImage Interest Group, IIG An Interest Group is a precursor to a full TDWG Subgroup. It functions informally until there is sufficient mass to propose a full Subgroup. *PROPOSED CHARTER, put up for comment!* *1. NAME:* Image Intrest Group(IIG, a TDWG interest group) *2. VERSION HISTORY*
Current Standard: No standards are yet proposed
Most Recent Version:
Working Draft Version: *3. CONVENER:* Robert A. Morris, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts/Boston; 100 Morrissdey Blvd; Boston, MA 02125, USA Email: name [at] cs.umb.edu, replace "name" with "ram" *4. CORE MEMBERS:* The wiki has been inactive since St. Petersburg, so I list here only people I know to be active in image management research: Robert A. Morris (UMASS-Boston), Reed Beaman(Yale), Greg Riccardi (Florida State University), Stinger Guala (USDA PLANTS). *5. HOME ADDRESS:* [[http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/TDWGImage/]] *6. PURPOSE:* To seed the formation of a full TDWG Subgroup whose purpose would be:To develop standard computer-based mechanisms for managing and transferring descriptive information about media including metadata terminologies, ontologies, descriptions, file exchange formats, and associated resources. *7. BACKGROUND:* Many TDWG members have an interest in images. The largest focus at the moment is digitization of specimens (not specimen records), but the increasing importance of observations, which often are documented by images, video, and audio, will lead to an ever greater demand for exchange standards, most notably for content metadata. The interest group emerged following an informal brief meeting in Christchurch at the 2004 meeting, and a somewhat longer one at the 2005 meeting in St. Petersburg. The latter gave birth to the wiki at http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/TDWGImage/ *8. SCOPE:* A full subgroup may be expected to be concerned with the following topics, at least * Descriptive content metadata * File formats, especially new standards such as JPEG2000 * Standards for image GUID management and deployment * Best Practices for the acquisition, curation, and distribution of multimedia resources * Intellectual Property Rights * Outreach, e.g. workshops on image acquisition * Connections to other organizations involved with these topics to reduce duplication *9. AUDIENCE:* Everybody concerned with any aspect of documenting the nature and occurence of organisms, and their behavior and interactions in biotic systems. *10. OUTPUTS and OUTCOMES (and timeframe):* The formation of a full subgroup with an active wiki by June 1, 20007 *11. STRATEGY:* (What general approaches, principles or strategies are to be used by the group to achieve the outputs and outcomes): This needs a good hook, because everybody takes a lot of pictures, and few people do anything systematic with them. So the core group---if it agrees to be such---needs to brainstorm about strategies and seek advice from the TDWG executive committee. ---- -- Main.BobMorris - 05 Oct 2006@ 1.2 log @none @ text @d1 1 a1 1 %META:TOPICINFO{author="BobMorris" date="1160081013" format="1.1" version="1.2"}% d35 1 a35 1 * Standards for image LSID management and deployment @ 1.1 log @none @ text @d1 1 a1 1 %META:TOPICINFO{author="BobMorris" date="1160075435" format="1.1" version="1.1"}% d3 3 d7 1 a7 1 ---+ IIG Proposed CHARTER d20 1 a20 11 *4. CORE MEMBERS:* Current core members of the group are: Gregor Hagedorn (BBA, Germany), Bob Morris (UMAss, Boston, USA), Kevin Thiele (University of Queensland, Australia), Bryan Heidorn (University of Illinois, USA) Further contributors are acknowledged under "Background", below. *5. HOME ADDRESS:* [[http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/SDD/]] *6. PURPOSE:* To develop standard computer-based mechanisms for expressing and transferring descriptive information about biological organisms or taxa (as well as similar entities such as diseases), including terminologies, ontologies, descriptions, identification tools and associated resources. a21 1 *7. BACKGROUND:* TDWG endorsed the DELTA (Descriptive Language for Taxonomy) format as a standard for representation of taxonomic descriptions in the 1980's. The SDD subgroup was established 1998 as a subgroup of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG, www. tdwg.org) of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), in response to recognition that a program-independent, non-proprietary standard based on current data interchange techniques was needed. d23 1 a23 1 The subgroup has met many times since 1998, and conducted discussions by [[http://www.diversitycampus.net/Projects/TDWG-SDD//SDD-EmailList.html][email list]] and wiki pages. It has considered the needs of a wide variety of existing programs that manage, produce and consume biological descriptions, as well as incorporating new ideas that may be implemented in the future. d25 1 a25 1 The major meetings so far were: Canberra, Nov. 2001; Sao Paulo, Oct. 2002; Paris, Feb. 2003; Lisbon, October 2003; Berlin, May 2004; Christchurch, Oct. 2004; St. Petersburg, Sept. 2005, and Berlin, April 2006. Over 60 people contributed to these discussions. However, the help, criticism and energy of Jacob Asiedu, Nicolas Bailly, Damian Barnier, Donald Hobern, Trevor Patterson, Guillaume Rousse, and Steve Shattuck is especially acknowledged. d27 1 a27 1 Descriptive data, unlike specimen databases and name services, usually reside in many dispersed and independent data files. With few exceptions these are not provided by large organisations. d29 1 a29 1 Descriptive data range from unstructured natural language to highly structured (coded) data. Each dataset typically has an independent ontology. SDD has been designed to accommodate the current complexity, but also provide means for further (voluntary) standardizations of ontologies. a30 1 The SDD (Structured Descriptive Data) xml schema defines a method to encode descriptive data in biology and other subjects. The primary goal of the design is to increase the knowledge and availability of knowledge about the diversity of life on earth. However, it may be used in many other areas (including medicine, pathology, archeology, anthropology) wherever objects or classes of objects are described for later reidentification. It is hoped that this standard will reach general acceptance to become a successor to existing standards like DELTA or NEXUS. d32 9 a40 18 For the future we expect that the development of SDD forms a valuable contribution to future development of structured online monographs or species pages that include descriptive data as well as other biodiversity data. *8. SCOPE:* SDD documents may be used to express descriptions of biological taxa, specimens, and non-biological objects or classes. * SDD documents may include all or some of the following: * terminologies (e. g., characters and states, modifiers, character trees with higher concepts) * character ontologies (currently through char. trees, plans for more fundamental ontologies are planned for the future) * structured (coded) data * sample data (e. g., measurements) * unstructured natural language data * natural language data with markup * dichotomous or polytomous keys * resources associated with descriptions (e. g., images, references, links) * SDD is currently not designed to accommodate: * molecular sequence and other genetic data (although these may be considered in future versions) * occurrence and specimen data and representations of these (e. g., distribution maps) * complex ecological data such as models and ecological observations * organism interaction data like host-parasite, plant-pollinator, predator-prey * nomenclatural and formal systematic (rank) information d42 1 a42 1 *9. AUDIENCE:* Current and future users of SDD-enabled systems include taxonomists and systematists, ecologists, people in conservation agencies, school teachers, naturalists, quarantine officers, workers in disease control, etc. a43 1 In its direct form SDD is used by developers of software addressing these audiences. It is used particularly in support of interoperability and exchange mechanisms for software packages and web services handling descriptive data (e. g., "species banks" and interactive identification). d45 1 a45 1 *10. OUTPUTS and OUTCOMES (and timeframe):* The principal products of the SDD group are the SDD standard (SDD 1.0 endorsed by TDWG 2005), and the discussion framework captured on the [[SDD.WebHome][SDD Wiki]]. a46 1 The SDD Standard is currently relatively immature but stable. It is expected that ongoing experience is resulting in further developments. d48 1 a48 9 Current services using SDD are [[http://www.lucidcentral.org/][Lucid]], [[http://wiki.cs.umb.edu/][EFG]], [[http://www.identifylife.org/][IdentifyLife]]. ## ADD Bryans links, Johnsons (hymenoptera online?), *11. STRATEGY:* (What general approaches, principles or strategies are to be used by the group to achieve the outputs and outcomes) The SDD subgroup began discussing issues and scoping the standard through an email discussion group established in November 1999 (see the [[http://www.diversitycampus.net/Projects/TDWG-SDD//SDD-EmailList.html][SDD email list archives]]). This resulted in broad participation, but as a result of an extremely wide spectrum of expectations and approaches the discussion did not make substantial progress or convergence. The most effective strategy since 2001 has been found to be face-to-face [[MeetingMinutes][meetings]]. These meetings help to focus and to take uncertainties in the way to go, which can not be purely resolved by logical argument, into account. The use of Wikis has been similarly found to be an effective strategy of documentation. a52 4 Material to be perhaps incorporated This is a draft proposal for the TDWGImage Interest Group, IIG The goal of the IIG is to promote discussion of a53 1 The SDD Standard: a54 13 * provides a flexible, platform-independent data structure for the capture and storage of taxonomic descriptions * comprises a superset of data requirements of all existing programs * provides extension beyond existing programs where data requirements can be predicted * is readily extensible to account for future developments and data requirements * is human-readable (although it is assumed that in almost all cases standard descriptions will be machine-generated and processed) * is XML-based, and provides a schema for validation of documents. It facilitates: * lossless porting of data between standard-aware applications * achievable progressive markup of legacy descriptions, particularly natural-language descriptions * comparability and, if possible, combinability of alternate descriptions of any one taxon * efficient multi-tasking of descriptions (one description serving alternate purposes) * archiving and sharing of raw and processed data a55 1 Motivation: In taxonomy, descriptive data takes a number of very different forms. Natural-language descriptions are semi-structured, semi-formalised descriptions of a taxon (or occasionally of an individual specimen). They may be simple, short and written in plain language (if used for a popular field guide), or long, highly formal and using specialised terminology when used in a taxonomic monograph or other treatment. Dichotomous keys are specialised identification tools comprising fragments of descriptive data arranged in couplets forming a branching tree. Each fragment (lead) comprises a small (occasionally verbose) natural-language description. Coded descriptions comprise highly structured data used in computer identification and analysis programs such as Lucid (www.lucidcentral.org) , DELTA and a suite of phylogenetic analysis programs such as PAUP. Raw data descriptions (Box 1.2.4) usually comprise repeated measurements of parts of individual specimens, and are the basis from which the more abstracted descriptions in natural language and coded descriptions are derived. Few taxonomists consistently record and archive their raw data in a standardised format. The goal of the SDD standard is to allow capture, transport, caching and archiving of descriptive data in all the forms shown above, using a platform- and application-independent, international standard. Such a standard is crucial to enabling lossless porting of data between existing and future software platforms including identification, data-mining and analysis tools, and federated databases. @