[Taxacom] International Day for Biodiversity

Tue May 22 14:27:40 CDT 2007

Donats mention of the lack of global awareness and interest in the International Day for Biodiversity is sobering.  

As one point of light and for the record, at 5:30 PM local time today, a workshop on a Brazil-wide biodiversity inventory (PPBio) will have a celebration of the IDB at the Museu Goeldi Parque, Belem, Para, Brasil. 

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James H. Beach
Biodiversity Research Center
1345 Jayhawk Boulevard
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045, U.S.A.

voice: 785 864 4645
fax: 785 864 5335

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Today's Topics:

   1. international biodiversity day (Donat Agosti)
   2.  Economist leader addressed to taxonomists: open access
      (Roger Hyam)

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 08:53:53 +0200
From: "Donat Agosti" <agosti at amnh.org>
Subject: [Taxacom] international biodiversity day
To: <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Message-ID: <00d401c79c3d$f6349dd0$845c010a at bern>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

Fabian Haas brought this to my attention:

Today is the "International Day for Biological Diversity"
http://www.cbd.int/programmes/outreach/awareness/biodiv-day-2007.shtml .

That this has hardly been picked up just explains the value of biodiversity
on the current political agenda and media interest. It is just not on the
radar anymore. Check in Google News (http://news.google.com/news?um=1
<http://news.google.com/news?um=1&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-15,GGGL
:en&q=%22International+Day+for+Biological+Diversity%22>
&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-15,GGGL:en&q=%22International+Day+for+Bi
ological+Diversity%22 ), there are only about 24 records (at 9am CET), of
which one is by the wire service Reuters. The recent acceptance of climate
change an the '8 year window' will certainly not help to foster the standing
of biodiversity but rather siphon away resources towards technical solution
in the battle against climate change. We better make sure we pool our
resources, provide access to our data through ingenious ways..even we need
to change, since we obviously failed.

Donat

Dr. Donat Agosti

Science Consultant

Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der
Burgergemeinde Bern

Email: agosti at amnh.org

Web:  <http://antbase.org/> http://antbase.org <http://antbase.org/> 

Blog:  <http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/>
http://biodivcontext.blogspot.com/

Skype: agostileu

CV <http://antbase.org/agosticv_2003.html>

Current Location <http://antbase.org/agosti_loc_bern.kmz>

Dalmaziquai 45

3005 Bern

Switzerland

+41-31-351 7152

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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 12:03:20 +0100
From: Roger Hyam <roger at hyam.net>
Subject: [Taxacom]  Economist leader addressed to taxonomists: open
        access
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Message-ID: <C1EE0FF7-6BA5-4224-AC66-4BCD5F7E7A0B at hyam.net>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=US-ASCII;       delsp=yes;      format=flowed

Hi Everyone,

In response to Donat's point number 8.

8. Add to all the specimen record a unique identifier, such as a doi, so
that in future arguments all the underlying data can be retrieved and
re-analysed to get at least this sore point in discussions out. Dito for
gene-sequences, morphological data, images..

I should point out that TDWG and GBIF are already working to build an 
architecture based on globally unique identifiers for Specimens, 
Taxon Names, Taxon Concepts and other classes of object that are of 
significance to our understanding of biodiversity. For these objects 
we favour the use of LSID - although we are not suggesting that they 
will be the only form of GUID used in our community.

The root TDWG page for GUIDs is here:

http://www.tdwg.org/activities/guid/

There is a valuable summary of LSIDs (the result of a recent workshop 
held in Australia)

http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/GUID/AbfLsidMeetingExecSummary

Globally Unique Identifiers, metadata standards and exchange 
protocols form the three legs on which a global biodiversity 
informatics architecture is being built. TDWG is working to encourage 
the adoption of standards in all three of these areas.

All the best,

Roger

____________________________________________________________

    Roger Hyam <roger at tdwg.org>
____________________________________________________________

    Biodiversity Information Standards: http://www.tdwg.org/

    "Working To Make Biodiversity Data Global"
____________________________________________________________

    TDWG Standards Architecture: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG
    LSID RDF Vocabularies: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/
LsidVocs
____________________________________________________________

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