ToLWeb

Links to stakeholder community

• Contributors
  • Phylogenetic contributors
  • image contributors
  • other contributors?
• Research users
• Educational users
  • TreeHouses http://tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/treehouses.html
• Data providers linking to content
  • EoL?
  • others?

Meeting Notes

Telecon, 8 December, 2009

present:

Agenda: Nico, Arlin, Enrico, Hilmar, Rutger

1. Decide on a brief statement of who we are, what are our goals, and what we expect from this process.
2. List stakeholders communities, decide on the subset of stakeholders to include right NOW in the process
3. Decide on main points of the White Paper
4. Decide on logistics of how we will get this done
   • who is going to contact whom about getting involved at this (early) stage?
   • who is going to set up the whitepaper doc and manage permissions and access?
   • who is going to talk to possible sponsors (NESCent, BioSynC, other) about how to proceed?
   • who is going to gather links and other useful info

Minutes:

• This is a creative process out of which leaders will emerge.
  • We expect a vision to emerge that is fundable.
  • The EvoIO group has certain goals, pertaining to interoperability and reusability, and may be involved in that vision in the end, but doesn't necessarily have to be.
• Need to find out more details about the Phyloinformatics Research Foundation
  • What is the purview of that foundation? Solely governance?
  • How is ToLWeb covered (governed) by this? What is the advisory board and who will be on it?
  • Hilmar should talk to Bill Piel to find out more.
• Who to include from the stakeholder community right away?
  • Curators: Lots of content contributed to ToLWeb by curators. Arlin will ask Katja Schulz who are the most active and would be best to include in a stakeholder meeting.
• What are the research uses of ToLWeb?
  • Information is sparse, incomplete, presented in the wrong form, difficult to access and reuse.
  • Some data is accessible programmatically but the APIs are undocumented and not known to anyone.
  • Many taxa and groups are missing.
  • How does ToLWeb overlap with Phylota, or TreeBASE.
  • We could use the TolWeb publication to look for who cites it: Maddison, D. R., K.-S. Schulz, and W. P. Maddison. 2007. The Tree of Life Web Project. Pages 19-40 in: Zhang, Z.-Q. & Shear, W.A., eds. Linnaeus Tercentenary: Progress in Invertebrate Taxonomy. Zootaxa 1668:1-766.
• We would need to include people who can represent future uses (or users) of a ToLWeb resource
  • For example, use in web-services and workflows (Mark Wilkinson?), or eco-phylogenetics (Cam Webb? Mark Schildhauer?)
  • Semantic Web aspect
  • ToLWeb right now seems to operate similar to EOL, except that it has clade pages, rather than species pages
• ToLWeb needs links to raw data (such as from TOLKIN), so that users can determine how the phylogenies were constructed.
  • ToLWeb needs to be integrated with data repositories for this purpose.
• Educational use: ToLWeb has a media use survey on each image page.
  • Can we obtain the data? Rutger will ask David Maddison.
• Main scope of the whitepaper is the stakeholder meeting, specifically to argue compellingly why 1) those who we want to attend should want to attend, and 2) those who can fund the meeting should fund it.
  • Give hints of what a future vision could look like, e.g., focus on phylogeny, comprehensiveness, integration with other resources.
  • ToLWeb could be a synthesis of the tree of life, with information harvested for each clade.
  • Emphasize standards-compliant programmatic access
  • Not sure how important and what features the visual (GUI) interface would need to satisfy.
• Need to clearly define the stakeholder meeting
  • Draft agenda. How will we get to decisions, follow-up, and actually doing something.
• There is a concern that the level of support for such an initiative within the systematics community.
  • But there is certainly enough support and supportive people in the community for moving forward.