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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
 
 
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
 
Criteria
 
 follow changes over time
 authoritative sources point to concepts
 Ed can provide checklists (American Fishery Society) with changes over time (every 10 years) - we would need to link changes 
 Bob - plants - checklists
 
DevelopmentTasksNov2004
 
Miscellaneous notes from thau
 
information in versioning systems have:
 
public versions 
private versions
working versions
 
might be nice to incorporate this notion into the lsid server
 
questions that come up when looking at browser tools
 
 
 who are the users?
 what visual representions do the users want? tree, graph, touch-graph?
 what work are we trying to make more efficient and how is that work done?
 what is the relationship between the visualization and editing tool?
 
note from jessie on point 2 - we found that taxonomists like trees, even though the underlying data model is a graph I published on this
 
 
 
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