iDigBio at TDWG 2017 - The Biodiversity Informatics Science and Standards Meeting of the Year.

iDigBio again provided recording services for all the plenary and breakout sessions. At one point 25 people joined the TDWG17 Conference online. Links to all the recordings, if you want to hear something again or in case you missed it the first time around, will be available on the iDigBio wiki or posted in the BISS journal shortly.

In addition to a keynote on Linking Heterogeneous Data on Thursday by our own Pam Soltis, iDigBio participated in organizing 4 symposia and workshops, gave 4 presentations, and even brought a poster. We also participated in two interest and task groups that met both before and during the meeting.

Matthew Collins co-convened a symposium titled Using Big Data Techniques to Cross Dataset Boundaries - Integration and Analysis of Multiple Datasets along with Robert Guralnick from the Florida Museum of Natural History, and Martin Kalfatovic from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). We had a great set of speakers who described their tools and experiences with data integration, from API use to semantic markup and ontology creation and alignment. Annika Smith, a graduate student from Dr. Soltis’ lab and iDigBio researcher, presented her talk: Using Ontologies to Explore Floral Evolution in a Non-Model Plant Clade which described her development of a new ontology for describing phenotypic evolution in plants.

Matthew also gave a talk titled Building Your Own Big Data Analysis Infrastructure for Biodiversity Science co-authored with Nicky Nicolson (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Jorrit Poelen (Global Biotic Interactions), Alexander Thompson (iDigBio), Jennifer Hammock (Encyclopedia of Life), and Anne Thessen (Ronin Institute). We summarized our experiences building the data analytics infrastructure behind our Global Unified Open Data Access collaboration and suggested others should build similar systems.

The Smithsonian took the lead with support from Deb Paul (iDigBio) and Gail Kampmeier from the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS), offering a symposium on Bridging Gaps between Biodiversity Informaticians and Collections Professionals designed to help everyone think about ways to make the 2018 meeting (and future research, and project endeavors) more productive and collaborative. To kick off this symposium, The Darwin Core Hour Team started with a talk “Standards in Action: The Darwin Core Hour” and as a spur-of-the-minute idea - presented a “Darwin Core (Quarter) Hour: Extensions - in Short” by Paula Zermoglio so that the BIS(TDWG) conference attendees could see for themselves what we are trying to do in the DwCHour project. Holly Little (Smithsonian) provided some insights and feedback from the Biodiversity Informatics 101 Workshop at SPNHC 2017 showing more than 60% of our 50 participants believe this course needs to be offered regularly. Other speakers like Henry Engledow shared some potentially very valuable ideas and lessons learned about negotiating between IT and non-IT staff and researchers in his talk “How Mass Digitization is changing Herbarium Collection Management at the Botanic Garden Meise (BR) – Teaching old dogs new tricks!” Henry, we hope you can give a talk about this at the next Botany meeting.

The BIS (TDWG) Natural Science Collections Description Interest Group (NSCD) is writing a charter for the Task Group to further develop a standard to support collections-level metadata sharing. With a robust standard in place, it will be much easier to calculate the current worldwide state-of-affairs in collections when it comes to understanding collections gaps as well as how much of them are digitized, georeferenced, cited, or for example, in danger of disappearing and in need of support. This standard will underpin the goal and collaborative work of GBIF (and others) to develop a robust worldwide interoperable collections data resource that interconnects such collections-level resources as Index Herbariorum (IH), Global Registry of Biological Collections (GRBio), and the US Collections list at iDigBio. If you are curious about this and what it all means for anyone in collections, listen to Sharon Grant’s (Field Museum) presentation “What’s Missing from All the Portals?.” Or check out Randy Singer’s presentation from SPNHC 2017 for a slightly different perspective on the same topic “Fantastic Fishes and Where to Find Them: A Dynamic Inventory of United States Fish Collections.” (It’s the next to last recording in this session).

The Data Quality Interest Group (DQIG) was also very active this year. iDigBio participated in a pre-tdwg DWIG Task Group meeting the Sunday before the conference, where the interest group laid out plans to finalize the deliverable for the task groups before the 2018 TDWG/SPNHC meeting. Most notably, ALA, GBIF, and iDigBio will be working together to implement a shared data quality testing and reporting framework over the next year as a reference implementation for the DQIG TG2 Tests and Assertions library. Alex Thompson, iDigBio’s representative on the interest group, also Co-convened this year’s symposium on Biodiversity Data Quality.

Gaurav Yeole, one of our master’s students in the Advanced Computing and Information Systems lab, presented a poster titled A Pipeline for Processing Specimen Images in iDigBio - Applying and Generalizing an Examination of Mercury Use in Preparing Herbarium Specimens that summarized his work facilitating deep learning analysis on data in iDigBio. This poster was a collaboration with Rebecca Dikow, Paul Frandsen, and Sylvia Orli from the Smithsonian Institution and built upon Sylvia’s presentation on neural networks at SPNHC this summer.

So much more great content at this year’s BIS(TDWG) meeting! Have a look for yourself in the BISS TDWG Proceedings 2017.

If iDigBio’s work at the conference wasn’t enough, Matthew, Deb, and Alex, along with Karen Cranston from Agri-Food Canada, Jake Szamosi from the University of Toronto, and Jocelyn Pender from Agri-Food Canada hosted a Data Carpentry workshop at the Canadian Museum for Nature during the weekend before. Nineteen TDWG attendees and local students from around Ottawa spent two days learning about R, OpenRefine, spreadsheets, and SQL. Post workshop survey data suggests everyone is glad they attended. The venue provided us with terrific food for feeding the new connections in our brains.

For iDigBio’s part in the 2018 SPNHC-TDWG Conference and contributions to the BISS TDWG 2018 Conference Proceedings, we are discussing such topics as image analysis, hackathon possibilities, citizen science data quality, sustaining digitization infrastructure and data use, outreach to industry, agriculture, ecology, policy-makers, and more. Quite a few folks at TDWG would like to see more hackathon type events at TDWG in the coming years. Working with SPNHC next year - what shall we hack? Got ideas? Let’s propose them! Hope to see you next year - in person or through the magic of Adobe Connect.