HISCOM Teleconference March 2008

The HISCOM Teleconference for March 2008 was held on Wednesday 19 March at 13:00 AEDT.

(Agenda was moved to the Talk page.)

ALA-supported Web Services

 * BioCASe
 * TapirLink
 * ALA's own?

EOL having meeting in Woods Hole in a few weeks' time.

Timing of HISCOM and TDWG
TDWG is happening from Sunday 19 to Saturday 25 October 2008. A Phylocode meeting is being organised around TDWG. All of HISCOM should attend TDWG, if possible. How can we get everyone here, but not wear everyone out too.


 * Field trips and other items will get in the way of HISCOM.
 * One day meeting at most, and keep the agenda to the critical items.
 * Get standard HISCOM business out of the way using teleconferences.
 * HISCOM meeting could occur prior to TDWG. (TDWG planning could get in the way.)
 * FCIG (Faunal Collections Informatics Group) need to be encouraged to attend TDWG too.
 * HISCOM phone hookup prior to TDWG will resolve HISCOM-specific issues.
 * Greg has made a request to Donald to support a meeting of HISCOM members with Donald to sort out AVH issues. July might be appropriate.
 * CHAH meeting -- 25-26 September 2008.
 * Visitors may want to visit Australian institutions to help substantiate their travel claims. Action: Alex to put a note on TDWG about contacting us ahead of time.

Resolution: July meeting of HISCOM funded by ALA, teleconference around 13 October, 1-dayer around 27 October, dinner sometime during TDWG with FCIG.

AVH 2

 * Need to get AVH 2 released.
 * Need to test the functionality (post-Darwin tests)
 * Bill seeking to employ a graduate botanist to help collate the remaining issues. Then Rex Croft will assist SAPAC with implementing the required changes.
 * HISCOM institutions need to update their static data dumps in consultation with Shunde.
 * Funding won't come from DEWHA until the AVH 2 is released
 * Get a proposal to CHAH on the issue of employing Rex
 * Action: All HISCOM members to collate and document the issues in the wiki. Recommendation: (Peter) Develop a proposal to CHAH to support AD to employ 2 people (1 person for 5 days, and 1 person in 3 days) to document and resolve the issues preventing the AVH release.
 * Letter case changes for country name and state, e.g. "Australia" vs. "AUSTRALIA" should happen in filter software or in the AVH itself, not in the source database*, because letter case is not   it is  . (* This is Ben's point of view)

Doing queries of AVH from a list of names

 * Copy and paste into a web form
 * What happens for a query when a name has a subspecies or an ?
 * Orthographic variants won't be easily handled, but that is OK