A great participation in Beijing, China.
Nǐ hǎo! Last month, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Biodiversity Informatics Standards Organization (www.tdwg.org), one of my favorite meetings of the year because it provides a thorough view of the current advances in the field of Biodiversity Informatics. TDWG 2012 was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, on Oct. 22-27.This meeting was particularly relevant for the Biodiversity Heritage Library because of its role: "Toward an International Infrastructure for Biodiversity Information". Personally, this was my first time involved as Technical Director of BHL and therefore, I wanted to get as much as possible from the opportunity, sharing the technical work that all my BHL colleagues around the world have done this year and conveying the message of the new challenges that BHL will follow.
I arrived on Saturday and attended the TDWG Executive Committee Meeting all Sunday. On Monday, Oct. 22nd, after the formal opening and introductions and a warm welcome by the hosts and TDWG officials, the Plenary speaker, Dr. Robert Robbins, presented on “How Diverse is the Biosphere? New Tools, Recent Discoveries, Huge Implications," followed up by several paper presentations that addressed different topics on biodiversity information standards, organization of genomic data, aggregation efforts, regional initiatives and developing technologies. I presented on the work done by our colleague Trish Rose-Sandler to define the functional requirements for a repository of citations as improvements to our existing infrastructure in The BHL and bibliographic citations and commented on our plans in BHL towards new services in support of a Global Names Architecture.
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| Tom Garnett Former BHL Director |
Closing Tuesday morning, the JRS Biodiversity Foundation and the Belgian Cooperation for Development sponsored the African Biodiversity Information Symposium. It was great to see there, among other presenters, two of our colleagues who participated last year in the JRS Africa Digitization Workshop in Chicago (previous to the Life and Literature Conference): Dr. Alex Asase, from the Department of Botany, University of Ghana was presenting on “Developing biodiversity informatics infrastructure to support conservation of plant diversity in Ghana” and Lucy W. Wauringi, from Africa Conservation Center in Kenya, presented on “Building Biodiversity Information Networks for the compilation of Kenya’s Natural Capital”. Dr. Asase was also present at the BHL Africa Meeting earlier in June of this year at SANBI.
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| Dr. Hong Cui presenting at the Institute of Botany, CAS |
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| Art of Life at TDWG 2012 poster session |
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| Dr. Fenghong Liu at the Institute of Botany, CAS |
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| Dr. Xu Zheping attending TDWG 2012 |
Finally, during the Lighting Talks on Friday, Janna Hoffman, from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, a BHL-Europe member, presented on Open Up! paleontological multimedia data for the public. I also took the opportunity to give a short talk reminding all attendees interested in contributing to the Art of Life Schema to please send us their feedback.
As the meeting came to an end, with a feeling of having attended a very fruitful and busy event, where Global BHL staff was definitely present and very active, we all said goodbye, hoping to meet again next year during TDWG 2013 in Florence, Italy. By the way, next year's Chair of the Program Committee will be our colleague of BHL-Europe, Heimo Rainer, from the Natural History Museum of Vienna!
And for those of you interested in reading more in depth about any of these topics, I invite you to look at the TDWG 2012 program in more detail and browse through the presentations linked here: http://www.tdwg.org/fileadmin/2012conference/slides/TDWG_2012_Presentations.pdf...
Until the next one, Xièxiè! Ciao!
- William Ulate R., Global BHL Coordinator & BHL Technical Director
Until the next one, Xièxiè! Ciao!
- William Ulate R., Global BHL Coordinator & BHL Technical Director
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| The Great Wall of China |
