Working sessions

Schedule

The latest schedule (21 Oct.) has been posted as a Google spreadsheet. See the TDWG 2021 Working Sessions Schedule. Three time zones are listed for start times of each session. Time zone differences across our global community make it unavoidable that some sessions of interest may occur well outside of normal working hours or during the middle of the night for some.

Check back for more repeated sessions to be added soon. Each session will be recorded and made available for later viewing. Session organizers are encouraged to use shared notes to enable asynchronous participation. Links will be added to the descriptions below after the live session.

Registration and how to support the conference

Registration is available through Eventbrite. Registration is required to participate in the online events (so we can arrange sufficient capacity), but registration is free.

The services required to run an online conference, however, are not free. We encourage all participants to join TDWG as an individual member or through an institutional membership.

Sessions

WS01: GeoSchemes (Terrestrial Domain)

Date/time: November 24, 13:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Workshop
Organizers: Francisco Pando, Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC / GBIF Spain, Madrid, Spain; Nicolas Bailly, FishBase/SeaLifeBase, Q‑quatics, Philippines, Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Sea Around Us, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Visotheary Ung, Museum Nacional d’Histoire Natural, Paris

This workshop will focus on reviewing the work done so far in relation to bringing up-to-date the “World Geographic Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions” in the context of the newly created “Geographic Schemes”, and to gather more input and participation in the current developments. We will specifically address the terrestrial component. More information at: https://github.com/tdwg/geoschemes

WS02: Plinian Core

Date/time: November 24, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Workshop
Organizers: Francisco Pando, Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC / GBIF Spain, Madrid, Spain

With this workshop we aim to:

Present the recent developments and point to future directions of Plinian Core, specifically the works to make Plinian core compliant with the TDWG’s SDS (Standards Documentation Standard.
Maintain an open discussion on different aspects of Plinian Core implementation, documentation and evolution as to gather feed-back and additional participation to tackle the Plinian Core specification maintenance and future developments. More information at: https://github.com/tdwg/PlinianCore

WS03: Hands-on session on standardization of biological interactions data

Date/time: November 10, 14:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Workshop
Organizers: José Augusto Salim, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil; Maarten Trekels, Meise Botanic Garden, Meise, Belgium

Primary data about biological interactions (e.g. predator-prey, host-parasite, pollinator-plant, frugivore-plant) are becoming increasingly available online and can be accessed from a great number of data repositories. However, the lack of a formal standard to support biological interaction data sharing and interoperability, makes data aggregation a laborious task and therefore it has hampered the development of wider, more integrative studies. Even the terminology itself is not well established. Different terms have been used to designate different or same concepts related to biological interactions. Terms like “species interaction”, “biotic interaction”, “ecological interaction”, “interspecific interaction” and “biological interaction” are frequently used interchangeably in the literature. Despite the variety of methods to collect, record and store biological interaction data, there is a great need and interest in making these datasets comparable and interoperable, considering the importance of understanding such processes’ role in sustaining biodiversity. Thus, the aim of this hands-on session is to gather people with different views and expertise on how biological interactions data can be organized and which are the most relevant elements for sharing biological interactions data - probably, there is a minimum set of attributes and properties common to all or most interaction data use cases. The hands-on session will be a practical exercise to guide participants on how to document biological interaction data using current biodiversity data standards (e.g., Darwin Core), and will promote discussions among the participants for the development of a best practice guide for documenting biological interactions. Since there are many different use cases and due to time constraints, during the session we will cover a subset of use cases proposed by the participants and all the session’s activities will be focused on the selected use cases. We will evaluate the suggested use cases and select a subset based on the demand, complexity and diversity. The objective is to cover the most common and yet different - in terms of type of interaction - use cases that fits the session duration. However, we will create discussion on the TDWG Species Interaction Data Interest Group GitHub repository for all use cases (including the use cases not selected to be handled during the session). In the discussions we will encourage people to provide examples of interaction data and collaboratively elaborate a standardized version of the working datasets.

Date/time: November 17, 20:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Workshop
Organizers: David P. Shorthouse, Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Quentin Groom, Meise Botanical Garden, Meise, Belgium; Elspeth Haston, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland; Anne Thessen, Oregon State University, Oregon, USA

The People in Biodiversity Task Group within the Joint Research Data Alliance - TDWG Attribution Interest Group has a Charter with twelve deliverables all of which are nearing completion. We will provide an update of our accomplishments and will also look to the future. One of the goals of Task Group and that of the Interest Group is to democratize the activities of disambiguating people names and attributing data objects and products to reconciled identities. We will use this workshop to discuss and provide examples of how these linkages may participate in open, curatorial round trips to data providers and aggregators and to highlight the role that newly ratified Darwin Core terms, identifiedByID and recordedByID play in this emerging ecosystem.

FS01: Technical Architecture Group (TAG)

Date/time: November 10, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Functional Subcommittee meeting
Organizers: James Macklin, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada; Nicky Nicolson, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, UK

This session will involve an overview of the responsibilities of the Technical Architecture Group and a discussion and prioritization of relevant issues.

Repeated session (FS01-R): November 17, 23:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)

FS02: TDWG Outreach and Communication

Date/time: November 24, 14:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Functional Subcommittee meeting
Organizers: Mareike Petersen, Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) Berlin, Berlin, Germany

The meeting of the Outreach and Communication Sub-Committee will include a short overview of recent activities and future steps. In this working meeting, however, we would like to exchange views on TDWGs current logo and its recognition value. Should we revise the lettering and start the design of a new logo? If yes, what should a new logo contain and illustrate? Everybody who would like to contribute to the discussion is warmly welcome to participate!

ITG01: Earth Sciences and Paleobiology Interest Group

Date/time: November 4, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Holly Little, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, USA; Mareike Petersen, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany

This meeting of the Earth Sciences and Paleobiology Interest Group will include updates from and discussions about coordinating work and information sharing across related efforts like DiSSCo, COST Mobilize, and the Paleo Data Working Group. We will also delve into assessments of terms from TDWG data standards (e.g. DwC and EFG) and how to expand their use and applicability for earth sciences and paleobiology data.

Repeated session (ITG01-R): November 10, 23:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)

ITG02: Taxon Names and Concepts Interest Group (TNC)

Date/time: November 4, 21:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Niels Klazenga, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria/Atlas of Living Australia, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Johan Liljeblad, SLU Swedish Species Information Centre, Uppsala, Sweden

This year a TCS 2 Task Group was established whose job is to bring the Taxon Concept Schema (TCS) into a state in which it can be maintained, which means taking it out of the XML Schema it is currently in and turning it into a vocabulary standard similar to Darwin Core and Audubon Core. While the Task Group is doing its work, the Interest Group has suspended most other activities. Therefore, while at last year’s Interest Group meeting we had more general discussions about what we are looking for in a standard for dealing with taxon information, in this meeting we will do a deep dive into TCS, discussing where we have gotten to so far and which issues need further discussion. As always, we very much like input from people outside the Interest Group, partly because knowing how the wider community feels about things might help resolve differences of opinion within the Interest Group and partly because it is better for issues we have not thought of to come up now than during review. All information can be found in the TCS 2 Task Group’s GitHub repository https://github.com/tdwg/tcs2/.

Repeated session (ITG02-R): November 18, 9:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)

ITG03: Citizen Science Interest Group - PPSR core

Date/time: November 18, 20:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Rob Stevenson, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, USA; Libby Ellwood, iDigBio: Global Communications Manager; La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angles, California, USA

The citizen-science IG facilitates the development and application of standards and best practices for collection and use of biodiversity data in partnership with our TDWG colleagues, the broader citizen science community via collaboration with the Data and Metadata Working Groups of the Citizen Science Association (CSA), information scientists and a host of other interested parties, including biodiversity scientists, resource managers, indigenous groups, natural history museums, GBIF, government agencies, and NGOs. The scope of this group includes all aspects of data collection, data quality, metadata and social computing as it pertains to the biodiversity domain.

In this working session of the IG, we will present relevant updates to the above as well as discuss the following: 1) How can we harmonize TDWG standard with PPSR Core? How do we promote and use the strength of both? 2) Using the forum as a mechanism to gage others’ thoughts. Summarize the state of affairs - look towards the longer term.

ITG04: Machine Observations Interest Group

Date/time: November 3, 21:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Peggy Newman, Atlas of Living Australia, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Peter Desmet

In this session we will tackle four discussion topics related to the work of the Machine Observations Interest Group: 1) A project to create a continuous data stream of insect biodiversity using a sensor network grid, 2) Camtrap DP as an example of a Frictionless community standard, 3) Lessons from the standardisation framework for bio-logging data to facilitate exchange between manufacturers and repositories and 4) How to document Darwin Core transformation guides in a human- and machine-readable way? Each of the topics will be introduced with a five minute primer and allow 20 minutes for discussion and questions. The last 20 minutes of the session is reserved for open discussion. Anyone is welcome to join.

ITG05: Genomic Biodiversity Interest Group - SESSION CANCELED

Organizers: Gabi Droege, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Katie Barker, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, USA

Genomic Biodiversity Interest Group Page

ITG06: Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD) Interest Group

Date/time: November 18, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Anton Güntsch, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany; David Fichtmüller, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany

The main topic of the meeting will be the discussion of the status of ABCD 3.0 ratification.

ITG07: Darwin Core Maintenance Group

Date/time: November 3, 12:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: John Wieczorek, VertNet, Rauthiflor LLC, Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina

Annual open meeting of the Darwin Core Maintenance Group to Introduce Darwin Core, share updates on developments, support usage, and make progress on open issues.

Repeated session (ITG07-R): November 11, 23:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)

ITG08: Collection Descriptions Interest Group

Date/time: November 18, 14:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Matt Woodburn, Natural History Museum, London, UK; Sharon Grant, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, USA

The TDWG Collection Descriptions (CD) Task Group has developed a data standard for describing collections The standard is currently approaching formal review for ratification, and this session will cover:

What it is & Why it is: Background and intro; Problem description; Scope; Nuts and bolts
How you use it: Use cases and example-models; General recipes and how-to’s; Showing the process
Now use it!: Tutorial; Create a wikibase record for your institution/collection

ITG09: MIDS Task Group

Date/time: November 4, 13:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Elspeth Haston, RGBE, Edinburgh, UK; Alex Hardisty, Cardiff, UK

The MIDS Task Group has developed a draft specification. The group is now focused on finalising the specification for MIDS Level 1 (Basic record). A conformance statement template has been developed and is being tested. The meeting will include feedback from test implementations and guidance for more institutions to test implementation.

ITG10: How did it die? Task Group

Date/time: November 17, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Sophia Ratcliffe, NBN Trust, Nottingham, UK

We will report on the progress that we have made. A proposal has been submitted for the addition of a new Darwin Core term called vitality to indicate whether the organism was alive or dead at the time of collection or observation: https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/363. The proposal is ready for public comment, and we would appreciate any comments and support for the term.

We are preparing a proposal for a new extension for information relating to the cause(s) of death. We would welcome feedback on the proposal and any use cases of datasets with cause of death details that we could map to our proposed controlled vocabulary.

Our Github repository is here: https://github.com/tdwg/how-did-it-die.

ITG11: Views Controlled Vocabularies Task Group

Date/time: November 11, 21:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Steve Baskauf, Vanderbilt University Heard Libraries, Nashville, TN, USA

This task group is chartered by the Audubon Core Maintenance Group and is tasked with developing controlled vocabularies for the ac:subjectPart and ac:subjectOrientation terms. It has neared completion of its work, and at this session we will describe the proposed controlled vocabularies and how they may be used.

ITG12: Audubon Core Maintenance Group

Date/time: November 10, 21:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Steve Baskauf, Vanderbilt University Heard Libraries, Nashville, TN, USA

This group maintains the Audubon Core vocabulary. Over the past year, we completed sound-related term proposals, worked extensively on a proposal for defining regions of interest (ROIs), and worked on example guides for still images and sound. At this session, we’ll review these accomplishments and answer questions about them, as well as solicit suggestions for activities during the coming year.

ITG13: Observation and Specimen Records, what’s new - SESSION CANCELED

Organizers: Quentin Groom, Meise Botanical Garden, Meise, Belgium

Observations and Specimens Interest Group Page. See updates from the task groups of this interest group - ITG14: Humbolt Extension to Darwin Core, ITG10: How did it die?, and ITG16: Plant Phenology Standards.

ITG14: Humboldt Extension to Darwin Core Task Group

Date/time: November 17, 13:00 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Yanina Sica, Yale University, Hamden, CT, USA; Paula Zermoglio , VertNet, Bariloche, Argentina

In 2021 the TDWG Humboldt Core Task Group was established to review how to best integrate the terms proposed in the Humboldt Core original publication (Guralnick et al. 2018) with existing standards and implementation schemas. Since the different types of inventories can be thought of as Events with different nesting levels (events within events, e.g., plots within sites), and after an initial mapping to existing Darwin Core terms, it was deemed appropriate to start from a Darwin Core Event Core and build an extension to include Humboldt Core terms. The task group members currently meet every other Wednesday to revise all original Humboldt Core terms, reformulating definitions, comments, and examples, and discarding or adding new terms where needed. We are also gathering real datasets to test the use of the extension once an initial list of revised terms is ready, before undergoing a public review period as established by the TDWG process. At this session we will explain the process we followed, present the preliminary list of terms that would compose the extension, and invite all of you to join in an open discussion.

ITG15: Biodiversity Services & Clients IG meeting

Date/time: November 11, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Falko Glöckler, Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Anton Güntsch, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Based on the three sessions coping with APIs during the TDWG conference 2021 we would like to discuss the outcome and identify requirements for the community of both users and developers of API endpoints, their accessibility and documentation. We will discuss the future of the Biodiversity Catalogue (https://www.biodiversitycatalogue.org/) and other opportunities to register web services in the domain of biodiversity, ecology and earth sciences. Outcome of the meeting can be a work plan for the upcoming months, ideas for new or additional Task Groups that cope with feasible pilots to support the community regarding web services and APIs.

ITG16: Plant Phenology Standards Task Group

Date/time: November 3, 17:30 UTC (Convert to your time zone)
Session type: Interest/Task Group meeting
Organizers: Jenn Yost, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA; Katie Pearson, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA

In this session, we will discuss a standard vocabulary for a phenology DwC extension using vascular plants as our primary case study.

Code of Conduct

By participating in TDWG 2021, you agree to abide by our Code of Conduct.

Contact

Please send questions to WrkSessCoord@tdwg.org

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