VoCamp1/WrapUp

Consider four questions for open discussion:

1. What worked?
2. What didn't work?
3. What should we do differently next time?
4. How should you (we) follow up on what we have done here?

Evaluation of the VoCamp

1. What worked?
   • Having this coincide and colocate with the TDWG meeting was a great idea.
     • Although one of the downsides from this was that there were competing sessions that created conflicts for various people.
   • Bootcamps were very important.
     • Phyloinformatics bootcamp was the best, right level of detail for attendees to learn,
   • Bootstrapping of each group worked well, each had the expertise they needed.
     • Doing this a-priori would be difficult.
2. What didn't work?
   • Didn't communicate with potential remote contributors and participants.
   • A lot of learning from each other took place only at the event, maybe could be shifted to happen in advance.
   • Some of the bootcamps were overwhelming in the amount of detail and the speed at which it was presented. More thorough explanation.
     • On the other hand, there is only limited time for each bootcamp.
   • Tools and technologies are often not mature in these endeavors, and therefore just having time in advance may not suffice.
   • More frequent updates, stand-ups, and news updates about what is going on now could be helpful.
   • Meeting room logistics at LIRMM may have taken some time to get us settled.
   • Projectors could have been useful to more than one subgroup.
3. What should we do differently next time?
   • Better coordinate with the TDWG program committee to minimize conflict of schedule (though there was some coordination as at least one of the participants was also on the TDWG committee).
     • An alternative is to start in advance or extend after the end of the conference.
   • Appropriate bootcamps could be made available in advance as tutorials.
     • Tutorials for tools could also help.
     • Sometimes, having expert(s) within the group can be hugely more effective.
     • Could integrate the introductions with this.
     • Video-taping of bootcamps or tutorials so it is available to others.
   • Taping the final stand-ups might also be good for record keeping.
   • Coordinate with the greater VoCamp community.

Sub-group-specific followup ideas

1. Triplestore
   • Command-line utility taking a pointer to a file of GBIF occurrence records and a pointer to a kml file as input, and producing a list of all occurrence records bounded by the polygon as output.
   • A massive triplestore of biodiversity knowledge: occurrence records; biodiversity inventories of the world's protected areas; shapes files for protected areas; shapes files for countries and regions; food webs; species profiles; conservation status; invasiveness status; range maps; genomics data; etc.
   • A matrix of rdf constructs and idiosyncracies, and the way they are interpreted by different parsers.
2. Phyloreferencing
   • Develop a vocabulary ontology in CDAO-discuss
   • PhyloWS mini-hackathon: Reference implementation
   • PhyloWS mini-hackathon: Show me the tree for my group
   • Electronic resources for phyloreferencing community
   • Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project ideas
   • Develop RDFa specification for phyloreferencing metadata markup in XML, HTML, etc.
3. Taxonomic Reasoning
   • A variety of grant application ideas and future collaborative efforts have been discussed by the team. In particular, Dave Thau is planning to submit an NSF grant.
4. Publishing taxonomies
   • Considering expanding and deepening the work to the level of a journal, conference, or at least Technical Report publication.
5. Integrating ontologies
   • Build a web-based service to allow a user to choose two ontologies and align them in order to produce an adapter ontology as an output.
   • Suggestion: querying DarwinCore repositories through character state data as an entry to an data integration challenge?
6. SADI
   • Will continue to create services that utilize GBIF data.
   • Suggestion: This is one step away from Joel's initial pitch to integrate gene function annotation (through GO) with specimen and locality data.

Other followup Ideas

• Issue a data integration challenge, or coordinate with one that is already being planned or exists.
  • SONet is planning a data interoperability challenge for its next meeting, maybe there is room for synergy.
  • Front-load competitions by showing that the necessary parts are available and functioning.
• Knowledge capture initiative for data sources, where to find them, what exists. Many questions revolved around "If I had the data."
• Find ways to link up the dedicated work forces that may be tasked at participants' home institutions.
• Utilize the TDWG organization to organize a follow-up meeting early in 2010.
  • Other organizations (such as NESCent, NM State, BioSynC) may provide support for more targeted implementation activities.
• Letters of support (or collaboration) for NSF grant applications.
• BioSynC takes proposals for biodiversity synthesis meetings, NESCent takes informatics whitepapers and applications for synthetic Catalysis Meetings and Working Groups.
• Best practices for ontology development document, such as "10 most important things to consider before developing an ontology."