The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an institutional member of TDWG. TDWG was formed to:
establish international collaboration among biological database projects. TDWG promoted the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the World's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) now focuses on the development of standards for the exchange of biological/biodiversity data.
The TDWG 2017 Annual Conference, the theme of which was "Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments" (see the full program here), provides the opportunity for bioinformatics professionals to meet and exchange a wide variety of ideas. Held in Ottawa, Ontario, the conference was hosted by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature (a BHL Affiliate).
This year, The Biodiversity Heritage Library organized a symposium, "500 Years of Big Data from the Biodiversity Heritage Library", organized by BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic and BHL Program Manager Carolyn A. Sheffield. In addition to the BHL symposium, BHL web developer Mike Lichtenberg participated in the symposium "Using Big Data Techniques to Cross Dataset Boundaries - Integration and Analysis of Multiple Datasets", organized by Kalfatovic, Matthew Collins, and Robert Guralnick.
See details about the symposiums below:
BHL Symposium (abstracts found in the links below)
- A path to continuous reindexing of scientific names appearing in Biodiversity Heritage Library data / Dmitry Mozzherin, Alexander A Myltsev. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20186 (11 Aug 2017)
- Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature / Mariah Lewis. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20146 (10 Aug 2017)
- BHL’s Feedback Tools and User Surveys: Investigating User Needs for Data in Digital Libraries / Carolyn A. Sheffield, Pamela McClanahan. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20003 (03 Aug 2017)
- How Did BHL Get to Big Data / Martin R. Kalfatovic. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20002 (03 Aug 2017)
- Scientific Names: Linking the Past to Provide Context for Knowledge / Thomas M. Orrell, David Mitchell. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e19937 (01 Aug 2017)
- Crowdsourcing Data Enhancements to Improve Named Entity Recognition in the Biodiversity Heritage Library / Katie Mika. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e17354 (25 Jul 2017)
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| From left: Lewis, Orrell, Mozzherin, Mika, Sheffield |
Symposium: Using Big Data Techniques to Cross Dataset Boundaries - Integration and Analysis of Multiple Datasets
- BHL: A Source for Big Data Analysis / Mike Lichtenberg. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 1: e20339 (16 Aug 2017).
Excursion
TDWG also offered the opportunity for excursions. The Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) provided an amazing tour of their collections facilities located just outside the city. The CMN library is also located at this facility and it was great to meet with the library staff and see their collections.
By Martin R. Kalfatovic
Program Director
Biodiversity Heritage Library