International Council for Science : Committee on Data for Science and Technology

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C O D A T A

Approved by the CODATA 23^rd General Assembly in Montréal 2002
Renewal approved by the CODATA 24th General Assembly, Berlin 2004
Renewal approved by the CODATA 25th General Assembly, Beijing 2006
Renewal approved by the CODATA 26th General Assembly, Kyiv 2008

http://www.bgbm.org/TDWG/CODATA/

Objective(s) of Task Group

The primary objective of this task group over the next year will be to develop a best practices guide for Observational data management and data exchange/sharing 

Over the past year the primary focus has been in conceptualizing a general Ontology for observational data. This includes co-chairing a National Science Foundation funded workshop to develop a requirements document for the creation of an observational data ontology.

Membership

Steve Kelling  Cornell, Lab of Ornithology chair
Vishwas Chaven, GBIF
Denis Lepage, Bird Studies Canada
Bruce Stein, NatureServe
Jerry Cooper, LandCare. New Zealand

Impact of the Task Group activities

Observational data gathered on organisms represents an enormous data resource for global biodiversity research. Presently, observational data are organized in heterogeneous structures and widely dispersed. Current efforts to organize observational data in global access facilities only represent observations in the same manner as specimens, and consequently do not capture all of the observational data. I have been asked by GBIF to organize an ad hoc working group to develop. Our goal is to develop a strategy for bringing observational data into the GBIF framework. Our interest in doing this is to continue to explore methods of bringing observations of organisms (as contrasted to environmental observations) into a single data framework. I believe that the Observation and Specimen Records task group efforts to include observational data within GBIF has begun to move GBIF away from simply thinking of all observations as museum specimens. Our goal is to develop a best practices guideline for the inclusion of these data.