[Taxacom] Apply now: Hackathon at the Netherlands Natural History Museum

[Rutger Vos]

Dear colleagues,

Recent years have seen a surge in projects that produce large volumes of
biodiversity data. Examples of these are structured, machine-readable data
as extracted from digitised heritage biodiversity literature, species
occurrence data, comparative data for phylogenetics, taxonomies, digitised
collection specimens, and so on.

These data can be represented in a variety of standards-compliant
interchange formats (using XML, RDF, JSON, etc.) making them amenable to
processing by generic, open source "data enrichment" workflows. The idea is
simple - enrich biodiversity data with meaningful links to related
resources, such as links from named locations to standardized
georeferences, links from taxon names to taxon concept URIs, links from
characters and traits to trait ontologies, links to relevant images,
semantic descriptions of data provenance, links to publications, and so on.

To this end, we would like to invite you to the "Data enrichment hackathon"
that will take place March 17th - 21st, 2014 at the Naturalis Biodiversity
Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands. The hackathon will bring together
domain experts in biodiversity informatics from a variety of subdisciplines
to be creative with biodiversity data and to write code.

The end result will be open source tooling that will allow stakeholders to
re-use and enhance biodiversity knowledge. We think that such tooling might
include tools that add properties to data; that convert between formats,
expanded controlled vocabularies or ontologies; data integrators;
annotations and query tools, etc.

The hackathon is organised with the support of Naturalis [1] in the scope
of the pro-iBiosphere project[2], an FP7 e-infrastructure project that
focuses on making biodiversity data and information (now entrapped in
literature) open, linked and digital. pro-iBiosphere has the vision of
implementing an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System (OBKMS), i.e.
an integration platform that will allow to produce Biotas (i.e. Floras,
Faunas, Mycotas and other revisionary taxonomic literature) of the future
in a flexible semantically-driven online environment.

We would very much appreciate if you can state your intent to participate
by the 14th of February 2014 at the latest. In order to facilitate the
organisation of the event and be aware of your interests and specialties
please fill in a brief questionnaire [3]. We have limited funding to
support the participation and travel costs of a number of participants. In
case you need funding to join the Hackathon, please indicate this in your
response to the questionnaire. If you are not able to participate but have
suggestions for other colleagues that could join the hackathon, please let
us know.

The agenda, accommodation and other relevant information is available on
our wiki[4]. For any additional question please email
Rutger.Vos at naturalis.nl or Soraya.Sierra at naturalis.nl.

We look forward to seeing you in Leiden!

With best regards,

Rutger Vos and Soraya Sierra

[1] http://www.naturalis.nl
[2] http://www.pro-ibiosphere.eu/
[3] http://tinyurl.com/NBCDataHackForm
[4]
http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Data_enrichment_hackathon,_March_17-21_2014