Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) is an international not-for-profit group that develops standards and protocols for sharing biodiversity data.   Read more.

TDWG 2009 - Montpellier France

e-Knowledge about biodiversity and agriculture

 

TDWG 2009 will be held in Montpellier, France from Monday November 9 until Friday November 13.

The meeting will be hosted by Agropolis and Bioversity International at Le Corum in central Montpellier.

Details about the conference are available from the MAIN CONFERENCE PAGE. Registration is now open!

The conference will include both plenary and theme-based working group sessions, poster display, computer demonstrations and tutorials. If possible, additional time for working group sessions may be able to be arranged.

The aim of TDWG 2009 is to work on real solutions for real problems. To this end, space for plenary presentations will be limited, and posters and computer demonstrations are strongly encouraged.

The traditional Conference Abstract Volume format will be modified to encourage the submission of contributed abstracts (not requiring an accompanying verbal presentation, poster, or demonstration) and selected longer submissions.

Themes

1. Outcomes of the e-Biosphere 09 meeting in London (1-3 June) – and taking the Roadmap for Biodiversity Informatics forward. Theme leader: Prof. Walter Berendsohn, Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM), Head, Department of Biodiversity Informatics and Laboratories
2. Agricultural biodiversity informatics – developing and expending standards. Theme Leader: Elizabeth Arnaud, Bioversity International Coordinator, Biodiversity Informatics Project
3. Data integration. Theme leader: Roger Hyam, Natural History Museum (London). Project officer, Pan European Species Infrastructure (PESI)

Candidate topics

• The TDWG Ontology
• Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs)
• Semantic web
• Data exchange protocols, including recent work on Darwin Core
• Geospatial information
• Multimedia standards
• Graphical Standards for Species identification
• Invasive species
• Agronomy
• Genomics
• Integrating functional traits
• Integration of wild and cultivated species
• Disease
• Citizen sciences, traditional knowledge

We are hoping to have a significant contribution from EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy - http://www.e-taxonomy.eu/)

Outcomes

• Advances along the e-Biosphere Roadmap
• A practical methodology to advance the utility of the TDWG Ontology and LSIDs
• A framework for addressing application areas such as agriculture and invasive species 

A Wiki page has been established to raise and discuss issues about TDWG 2009. A conference brochure (1.3mb) is also available.

The most widely deployed formats for biodiversity occurrence data are Darwin Core (wiki) and ABCD (wiki). New deployments of these and other XML based formats should use the TAPIR exchange protocol.

The TDWG community's priority is the deployment of Life Science Identifiers (LSID), the preferred Globally Unique Identifier technology and transitioning to RDF encoded metadata as defined by a set of simple vocabularies. All new projects should address the need for tagging their data with LSIDs and consider the use or development of appropriate vocabularies.

TDWG's activities within the biodiversity informatics domain can be found in the Activities section of this website.

Please consider becoming a member. TDWG needs everyone with a strong interest in biodiversity information to participate in developing effective standards for sharing that information. We need IT professionals, taxonomists, ecologists, geoscientists, and librarians. We need members from institutions and agencies that do or could use our standards to make their data more usable. Your participation ensures that what we develop will save you time and money.

There are three ways to join TDWG-

• Free registration              - Required to access TDWG online resources
• Individual Membership     - US$75/year
• Institutional Membership - US$500/year but US$400 if paid by March 1

Institutional members are entitled to up to five discounted registrations at the annual conference. Please visit the Membership page for more details.

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