AIMS

Announcing TDWG 2017

We are excited to announce that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature will host the 2017 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Ottawa, Canada, Oct. 1 - Oct. 6. It is critical that you contact us as soon as possible if you would like to host an event (e.g. training, a hackathon, or a workshop) either before or after the TDWG meeting, as accommodation space will be limited. Several options for venues are available. Below, please find a call for workshop and symposium proposals. Calls for presentations, computer demonstrations, posters, and meetings of TDWG Interest/Task Groups will be announced in April. Use #tdwg17 to stay informed.

About the meeting 
Standards for the description and exchange of biodiversity information help promote research, support decision-making for conservation and planning, and provide a means of communicating observations across taxa, sub-disciplines, and political boundaries. The annual TDWG conference serves two purposes:

• it is is a forum for extending, refining, and developing standards in response to new challenges and opportunities; and
• it is a showcase for biodiversity informatics - much of which relies on the specifications provided by TDWG and other standards organizations.

Our theme this year is Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments.

Associating genotypes with phenotypes has been the subject of previous TDWG symposia, and remains one of the great ongoing challenges of biodiversity science. It is complicated by our increased (but still nascent) understanding of the role played by microbiomes in phenotype expression. (As Bob Robbins pointed out in his 2012 keynote, some microbial genes, due to inter-species horizontal gene transfer, are better understood as attributes of a particular ecosystem than of a particular species.) Meanwhile, "habitat" remains one of the most over-burdened of Darwin Core terms, conflating climate, geology, taxonomic association, and other environmental variables. Our theme is intended to provoke discussion around questions such as: Can current systems, methods, and schemas be used to capture and understand patterns of association amongst occurrences, genes, phenotypes, and environments? If so, how? If not, what gaps need to be filled?

Call for Workshops and Proposals

We invite you to submit proposals for workshops and symposia, which can be organized around already established themes, or which can be used to explore emerging topics of interest.  At TDWG, a symposium is typically a collection of talks, sometimes with a panel or open discussion; a workshop may have talks, but typically encourages more active engagement through training activities, or through facilitating consensus around a key issue. Symposia and workshops addressing the conference theme are encouraged, but other topics relating to biodiversity information management, integration, analysis, and standards are also welcomed. Possible topics include:

• knowledge graphs
• metagenomics
• citizen science
• semantics and ontologies (e.g., sampling, traits)
• biological field station data management
• collections data visualization
• data quality assessment and improvement
• agricultural biodiversity
• conservation informatics
• illuminating dark data
• phyloinformatics
• ePublications
• standards for image processing (e.g. computer vision for organismal identification)
• wikis for biodiversity knowledge

For full consideration, please submit your proposal via email to [email protected] by 10 March 2017 (extended from 1 March). Proposals should be fewer than 400 words, and should include the following:

1. Names, email addresses, and affiliations of all organizers.
2. Whether the proposal is for a workshop or a symposium.
3. Whether the organizer(s) will accept unsolicited abstract submissions (vs. inviting all speakers themselves).
4. Number of 90 minute sessions requested.

Please note: As mentioned above, this is a call for workshop and symposium proposals only. The general call for contributed papers and posters will be announced in April 2017, after the symposia and workshops have been selected and announced. Please address questions to [email protected].