Encyclopedia of Life Blog

As e-Biosphere winds down, I wanted to report back on what happened, what I thought was interesting, and what my take-aways were.  The meeting had 483 participants from all over the world (42 countries!).

The set up and program were excellent, with a good diversity of speakers and perspectives.  Among my favorites were Jorge Soberon’s presentation on the need for integration across subdisciplines and fields and at varying scales. Nancy Knowlton’s presentation questioning whether we need to name biodiversity in order to study it and learn from it was probably the most controversial and thought-provoking. And Sandra Knapp’s presentation documenting the motivations and paths that the Solenum project used was informative and a great case study for how to effectively stimulate participation from a broad and diverse group of specialists.

The afternoon breakout session topics were broad and yet, interestingly, produced many common themes.  Group topics included ecology, cybertaxonomy, standards, developing countries, education, and conservation.  Common themes included a need for better standards, better metadata, simplification of contributions and involvement, and better templates. Also discussed were the importance of team building and collaboration, the key role of ecosystem services, and maintaining open access to information.

The main things that I will take away from the meeting are that there have been great advances in biodiversity informatics in the last 20 years, but there is still a long way to go. The field needs to articulate its goals better and communicate these goals with the public and policy makers in a more effective manner. Data sharing and collaboration are critically important to everyone, and major projects like EOL and GBIF need to take the lead in urging standards, creating templates and tools, and outreach.  We have a long way to go, but a great role to play.

Special thanks to the staff at the QE2 conference centre.  The facility is beautiful; bright and airy with stunning views of Westminster Abbey. Also special thanks to the organizing committee for bringing together a great group of speakers and participants.  I hope this becomes an annual thing!  A final thanks to NHM for hosting a lovely evening event (pictured above). Without them, I would not have been able to take the great photo of Jim Hanken and Sir Richard Owen below…

Hello from London! 

The e-Biosphere 2009 meeting has just begun.  Norm MacLeod gave the introductory remarks to open the meeting. MacLeod characterized the meeting’s purpose as addressing two major questions that humanity wrestles with; how do we understand the millions of species with whom we share the planet?  and how can we, as a species, deal effectively and intelligently with these species? Christian Samper, of the Smithsonian and EOL, gave the keynote speech.  As Samper put it, the bioinformatics community needs to forge connections among three different spheres: different types of information, different sources of information, and different users of information.  e-Biosphere’s goal is to facilitate and foster these connections.

EOL is a major sponsor for the meeting (along with CBOL and NHM) and the many EOL staff present are looking forward to a great meeting, with plenty of time for interaction and discussion.  We will be reporting from the meeting periodically over the next three days.