HISCOM 2005 Teleconference 2

2005 HISCOM Teleconference 2 was held by telephone on Thursday 15 September, 2005. This document represents the minutes of the meeting.

Attendance and Apologies

 * Bill Barker (Department of Environment and Heritage, South Australia)
 * Peter Bostock (Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland)
 * Alex Chapman (Department of Conservation and Land Management, Western Australia)
 * Gary Chapple (Royal Botanic Gardens, New South Wales)
 * Paul Coddington (School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide; Deputy Director, South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing)
 * Ashleigh Coombs (Department of Environment and Heritage, South Australia)
 * Ian Cowie (Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment, Northern Territory)
 * Jim Croft (Centre of Plant Biodiversity Research, Australian Capital Territory)
 * Steve Jenkins (Department of Environment and Heritage, South Australia)
 * Peter Neish (Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Victoria)
 * Ben Richardson (Chair; Minute taker; Department of Conservation and Land Management, Western Australia)
 * Helen Thompson (ABRS, Department of the Environment and Heritage, Australian Capital Territory)
 * Greg Whitbread (Centre of Plant Biodiversity Research, Australian Capital Territory)
 * Karen Wilson (Royal Botanic Gardens, New South Wales)

Australia’s Virtual Herbarium progress report

 * Prototype EWS and AVH almost complete
 * Available shortly on the SAPAC site for testing
 * Indexing is working
 * Needs a decent set of weed species
 * AVH MoU fields a good starting point for herbarium BioCASe data providers, additional fields could include:
 * Altitude
 * Depth
 * Naturalised status
 * ?Cultivated status?
 * Development team view current implementation of map display using Mapserver better than those that using an applet-based page
 * Avoids cross-platform, cross-browser problems
 * Avoids long download time required before page starts to work

T2 Action 1
Send Paul Coddington the AVH MoU document and help with mapping. [Bill Barker]

T2 Action 2
After CANB gets their BioCASe provider online, send mapping between ABCD and AVH MoU fields (perhaps as HISPID fields) to the HISCOM-L mailing list. [Greg Whitbread]

Other potential data providers
(Proposal to ask CHAH in Alice Springs to have NZ, fungal collections, UNE come on board if able to implement BioCASe providers.)

We would welcome other providers to be part of the AVH, perhaps with minor change to project name.

Direct contact for BioCASe implementors
All initial contact for technical staff tasked with implementing a BioCASe provider should go through Bill Barker to ensure the lines of communication are well understood.

Assisting herbaria to implement BioCASe providers
It was noted that only one herbarium had managed to implement a production BioCASE provider, and that there were time and/or resourcing issues preventing others from completing the task.

Mapping to ABCD fields from AVH MoU and/or HISPID

 * Denormalised databases are harder to map in BioCASe software
 * Make sure solutions are communicated to other herbaria wherever possible
 * MEL solutions documented on MEL CVS server
 * Fields not represented in ABCD must be stored as MeasurementOrFact elements with an attribute, such as “Naturalised”. The problem is that we must agree on the attribute name to be sure we are all sending the same data!
 * State is another value not easily represented in ABCD

GBIF & BioCASe — Are Australian herbaria planning to move to contributing directly to GBIF?

 * Generally agreed that herbaria are planning to publish their data directly in the GBIF network as a result of their work in implementing a BioCASe web service for AVH
 * It was noted that AVH membership at the GBIF level would be prudent for political reasons, but also that currently, institutions must register their web services individually because it is not possible to register a collection of services

What has been learnt from AVH validation procedures
It was generally agreed that getting data out of herbaria using BioCASe might be a very handy way to perform some validation of the data at a national scale, instead of piecemeal in each herbarium.

Are the implied plans to move beyond specimen data in AVH post funding?

 * Important to value add on AVH
 * Consensus Census moving things along
 * “Unfinished business”
 * A species bank style site might be doable with funding from GBIF

Google Earth and AVH

 * Google Earth is not permitted at BRI due to its use of network bandwidth
 * Has potential for use in natural resources, mapping of properties, council planning, protected species, tracking acid sulphate soils, point data for threatened species
 * Something to watch
 * Google Map may be better because it is a web site, and thus unlikely to be blocked by IT departments

Consensus Census

 * Australian Plant Census (APC) is the name of the dataset being constructed by CHAH’s Consensus Census Working Group
 * Will only include Australian records (e.g. will not include Papua New Guinean taxa)
 * Includes naturalised and native information, but not records of taxa that are only cultivated in Australia
 * APC is available via the CHAH web site

What is happening with the images resulting from the Australian Type Images initiative? Is the Kew work a de-facto standard?

 * There are approximately 1000 images in the collection, available via query from the ANHSIR web site
 * Goodeniaceae is an example of a group known to have images
 * Kew standard is not necessarily our standard
 * 2–10 MB JPEG images
 * Upside-down Epson scanners not working
 * IBC Vienna had a symposium on this

T2 Action 3
Email IBC Vienna Imaging Symposium to the HISCOM-L list. [Karen Wilson]

Should HISCOM put up its hand to take a leading role in organising the bioinformatics component of the next IBC in Melbourne?
Yes.

Discussion points for Alice Springs

 * Check CHAH Agenda for likely topics
 * How we go forward with AVH; review the Strategic Plan
 * Consensus Census
 * Specimen Imaging
 * Intersection of AVH and Consensus Census (i.e. handling queries in AVH that refer to different names in different states)
 * What is happening with ABIF; how does it relate to AVH etc.

Getting a handle on the TDWG trends
Visit the TDWG site and view the demos and abstracts.