[Taxacom] TED-prize for EO Wilson: some thoughts regarding thefuture of science communication

Thu Feb 22 08:37:09 CST 2007

I went into the web page you listed below and I got into the "Geniuses" (I
would say "Genii") but E.O. Wilson was not listed there. Neither was I.

Adolf Ceska, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-
> bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Donat Agosti
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 6:28 AM
> To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: [Taxacom] TED-prize for EO Wilson: some thoughts regarding
> thefuture of science communication
> 
> EO Wilson recipient of the TED award
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.ted.com/conference/flashpage.cfm?conferenceKey=2007
> 
> 
> 
> On March 8, EO Wilson will receive the TED Prize. It is a very prestigious
> award by the 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers in Technology,
> Entertainment and Design. The winners receive USD100,000 and can formulate
> a
> wish which the members of the TED community pledged to help to fulfill.
> 
> 
> 
> Congratulations to Ed Wilson to yet another great award, another
> confirmation of his outstanding achievements!
> 
> 
> 
> Let's speculate that Ed Wilson is going to fulfill his boyhood dream of an
> encyclopedia of life for ants. So, what would be needed to make this dream
> reality?
> 
> 
> 
> Ants are already on of the best documented group of animals in the world.
> There is an online catalogue of all the ants of the world updated as soon
> as
> another species is added  to the currently known 11,981 species. This
> includes a digital library linked to from the species citations to pdfs of
> all the non-copyrighted descriptions. Currently, all these over 4,000
> publications are being transformed to text by the Internet Archive, and
> the
> special mark-up schema, taxonx. is added for species and treatments or the
> descriptions of the species.  There are an estimated 6,500 species
> documented with high resolution, magnificent standard images, even well
> worth printing in large scale and hanging them on your wall. Through Brian
> Fisher's and Jack Longino's superb collecting efforts in such biologically
> important areas as Madagascar and Costa Rica, ants have most likely one of
> the best documented surveys for any group of animals world wide, easily
> accessible online. The evolution of ants is well documented through large
> scale DNA-based analysis. On top of this, data aggregator such as ispecies
> are using mash-up technologies to collect all these information
> automatically - information which is added by a large, sprawling community
> worldwide. This infrastructure and its content already has a broad impact
> beyond the ant world, especially into education and other life sciences
> sectors
> 
> 
> 
> What is missing? There are three issues, that is building up and
> maintaining
> the global infrastructure, the transfer of legacy data, that is
> publications
> and specimen data into the digital realm, and the generation of new
> research
> as input into such a system, which .
> 
> 
> 
> TED could help make advances in each of these three areas.  Most likely,
> the
> biggest impact, and one with an impact well beyond ants alone, would be to
> get the TED crowd to agree to build up a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
> repository and resolver for all the systematics legacy publications, the
> descriptions of the species, the species names, and the specimens. These
> are
> the basic building blocks of systematics through which the entire
> information on animals and plants could be pulled together now, but
> especially in a semantic Web or Web2.0 environment. It would also be the
> best  complement to the Biodiversity Heritage Library by the large US and
> UK
> natural history museums and institutions which will free knowledge hidden
> in
> millions of published literature.
> 
> 
> 
> Linking a statement with its evidence
> 
> Such a DOI based system would allow linking any comment made on the
> distribution or behavior of a species to its original  observation or
> reference specimen with an  attached Global Positioning System record.
> This
> will allow to pinpoint not only the proper name of and the specimen
> itself,
> but also its precise geographic origin which is living up to and can made
> the best out of high resolution satellite or map data, such as now
> publicly
> available at Google-Earth. Mash-up technologies would allow getting all
> additional information needed automatically, such as DNA-BarCode sequence,
> conservation status, studies on the biology or medical use or the
> increasing
> number of images and movies on Youtube or Yahoo as examples.
> 
> 
> 
> Open access to biodiversity knowlege
> 
> An agreement by the publishers to allow open access to all the articles in
> their journal covering the description of species, or even better
> biodiversity and conservation will have a similar impact as the
> applications
> of DOI's. Alternatively, the use of specific mark-up in their journal
> articles, delimiting the description allowing automatic data mining and
> extraction and thus building up the global Encyclopedia of Life.
> 
> 
> 
> Imaging
> 
> Finally, taking images of all those groups of ants which are increasingly
> used in surveys and to measure the loss of biodiversity ought to be
> another
> priority, since images are by far the most important element to identify
> species. This would ideally complement ongoing world wide efforts by a
> rapidly increasing crowd of specialists and amateurs.
> 
> 
> 
> Getting this infrastructure up would enable anybody in the world, from
> E.O.
> Wilson in his little home town in Alabama to any place in the developing
> world to participate in this feast of knowledge and motivate more people
> like Awatif Omer in Khartoum to pursue the discovery of new species in
> such
> places like Sudan.  The usage of all this information by the crowd, rather
> then expert's opinion, would then decide what the most authoritative
> contributions are
> 
> 
> 
> ------------
> 
> Catalogue of the ants of the World: http://antbase.org
> <http://antbase.org/>
> (in collaboration with the Hymenoptera Name Server): literature digitized
> with partial support from the Atherton Seidall Foundation at the
> Smithsonian
> Institution.
> 
> 
> 
> Online scientific images of ants: http://antweb.org <http://antweb.org/> ;
> http://www.evergreen.edu/ants/AntsofCostaRica.html,
> http://mcz-28168.oeb.harvard.edu/mcz/FMPro
> 
> 
> 
> Mashups: ispecies (
> http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/?q=Proceratium+google
> <http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/?q=Proceratium+google&#x0
> 02
> 6;#x0026;submit=Go> &#x0026;#x0026;submit=Go) and
> http://ispecies.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
> 
> Biodiversity Heritage Library: http://bhl.si.edu/
> 
> 
> 
> Taxonx: an example of a systematics specific mark-up schema:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/taxonx
> 
> 
> 
> An overview of the  global ant community:
> http://antbase.org/ants/publications/21146/21146.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> 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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