Seek Taxon Notes Nov 3

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Taxon Breakout at SEEK All-Hands Meeting 3 Nov 2004

Present: Jim Beach, Nico Franz, Jessie Kennedy, Trevor Paterson, Bob Peet, Xianhua Liu, Dave Vieglais, Dave Thau, Robert Gales, Susan Guach, Joana Trajkova, Gwen Davis, Ed Wiley, Aimee Stewart

Long term

If we were to support research sub project like catfish, tomato:

• Need some user interface application that allows authoring, mapping concepts (visual tool)
• What is their motivation, what do they get?
• document legacy of the field
• allow themselves and others to recreate lineage of knowledge
• ready themselves for the future of taxonomy
• gain greater use of their material by greater user community, stimulate research
• need to streamline process, make their job easier

Could a taxonomist turn this into a publication?

• would still do print/traditional publication
• how would they get output from db for publication
• we have not focused on tools for users yet
• must emphasize importance of what they are doing and making this available to a wider audience

Jim: Is it enough to improve our current products continue our direction?

• JK: need a strong illustration of usefulness of our concept approach - for that we need a lot more data
• Need specifics of promise of improved world for the taxonomists, etc
• to serve the ecologists (and other end users) well, we need the data and buy-in from the taxonomists
• need a good case study with experts from diff communities
• Ed Wiley: Need tool that allows taxonomists to enter their research, then clandestinely allows ecologists to find current nomenclature and synonyms. Trick is to add geographic information to concepts, querying ability.

Jim: risk in assumptions of critical problems to be solved - need serious use case analysis

• problem may be more that organism doesn't have good name
• is the concept even a first line of attack?
• JK: SEEK looking at bigger problems - time, geographical range, etc, not daily annoyances

Susan: 3-6 months to solve NA mammals problem, then on to more challenging problem that involves changing names, concepts over time, geography

• get some synergy between NSF projects
• catfish - lots of undescribed species, mostly in SA, good for us - provide tools for new discoveries

NA Mammal data taxon priorities

• Smithsonian MSW data - must find out how to interpret it
• Want to automate specimen data markup with algorithms, then have taxonomist check data
• put lots of data into Taxon cache
• expand matching algorithms
• plug into Ecogrid

BEAM - goal is to demonstrate long term