1. Acronym Soup GBIF, TDWG & GUIDs Jerry Cooper

2. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Established in 2000 through non-binding MOU (25 countries + 31 organizations) Essentially a global information infrastructure for sharing primary biodiversity data (species occurrences) GBIF network currently provides access to 120 million records from 1000 ‘collections’ Infrastructure evolved from existing exemplar networks – Species Analyst/DiGIR (Kansas), BioCISE/BioCASE (EU – Berlin) Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) provides a forum for development of GBIF technology

3. Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) Now re-badged as ‘TDWG- Biodiversity Information Standards’ 20 year history with focus of activity at an annual meeting Initial focus on database design and data dictionaries Recently evolved towards data exchange standards,ontologies and data sharing protocols An appropriate forum for developing the Veg-X standard?

4. Taxonomic Databases Working Group (TDWG) Existing TDWG Standards (existing or actively being developed): –Taxon Concept Schema (TCS) –Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) –Darwin Core (DC) –Structured Descriptive Data (SDD) –Collection – Institutional Metadata –Literature (citation and document structures for taxonomic literature) –Images –Geospatial –Observation & Specimens –Alien Invasive Species Profiles –Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) –TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval)

5. TDWG GUIDs Need for unique, persistent, resolvable identifiers to communicate about objects TDWG promotes Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) LSIDs are of the form: –urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:417119 –They are resolvable LSIDs are not URLs – resolution requires extra software. Debate continues about merits of LSID versus HTTP mediated schemes

6. LSIDs in action...

7. Server-side LSID resolver

9. Record Metadata returned as RDF XML Document

10. RDF subject-predicate-object triples for TCS name object

11. X-Standards, RDF & GUIDs TDWG reformulating existing standards expressed in XML-Schema as part of a generalized ‘TDWG Ontology’ RDF Metadata are formalized as ‘vocabularies’ derived from the ontology E.g. Return from IndexFungorum conforms to TDWG TCS Vocabulary LCR working on DotNet LSID server/resolvers and linking TCS/ABCD (for IndexFungorum and Zoobank)

12. Conclusions GUIDs essential for cross-referencing in any X-Standard – even if present as generic URI ‘placeholders’ for such things as Taxon Concepts etc. Merits of LSID/RDF still debated TDWG Ontologies and LSID RDF vocabularies immature But... point the way to components of a Veg-X standard that need to be harmonized across standards TDWG – appropriate umbrella organisation for development of a Veg-X standard.

14. Taxon Concepts VegBank Vocabulary Assertions –name/publication intersection Interpretation –something labelled with an assertion (observation, collection etc) Correlation –between interpretations as >,<, = Usage –3 rd party opinion, i.e. party 1 believes that party 2’s interpretation using name X should be labelled with name Y

15. Flavours of Taxon Concepts 1.Use of names in primary taxonomic literature Nomenclatural statement (name attached to types, isotypes & protologue description) Homotypic synonyms (names based on same type, ‘objective’) Heterotypic synonyms (names based on different types taxonomic opinion expressed as published list of synonyms. Perhaps with emended description and lists of collections examined 2.Use of names in secondary taxonomic literature names within floras/faunas, guide books, keys etc 3.Use of names attached to ‘events’ names within species lists, surveys, observation records etc For LCR & NZOR: 1 & 2 stored in taxonomic database. 3 stored against ‘events’ database. Systems need to ‘expand’ names against combined concept stores. TCS is designed to accommodate 1 & 2, not necessarily 3