IDigBio Working Groups

Overview

iDigBio supports a number of Working Groups. Several working groups are focused on the delivery of short-term objectives, while other standing Working Groups are tasked with ongoing research, development, and improvement activities. This page provides an overview of both current (active) and disbanded (inactive) Working Groups.

The section "Overlap with Other Working Groups" should be used to list subject areas that may duplicate some effort from another Working Group. When Working Group activities stray into these overlapping subject areas then collaboration between working groups is warranted for those tasks.

Active Working Groups

Public Participation in Digitization

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Austin Mast (Lead) Tom Nash Blanka Shaw Jon Shaw Matt von Konrat Andrew Sallans Michael Denslow Nelson Rios Barbara Thiers Deborah Paul Betty Dunckel Gil Nelson Bruce MacFadden
Mission & Scope	Identify and improve aspects of biodiversity digitization workflows that can be newly architected or enhanced to take advantage of public participation.
Overlap with Other Working Groups
Links	Listserv Working Group Wiki Joint Public Participation in Digitization/Eductation & Outreach Workshop

Authority Files

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Greg Riccardi (Lead) Katja Seltmann Stan Blum Andrea Matsunaga Gil Nelson Dorothy Allard Petra Sierwald Dean Pentcheff Paul Morris Debbie Paul
Mission & Scope
Overlap with other Working Groups
Links

Paleontology

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Bruce Lieberman (Lead), University of Kansas Bruce MacFadden, FLMNH Laurie Anderson, South Dakota School of Mines David Bloom, VertNet, UC Berkeley Greg Dietl, PRI Jere Lipps, John Cooper Museum Timothy Rowe, University of Texas Katja Seltmann, AMNH Dena Smith, Colorado Kathleen Springer, San Bernardino County Museum Barbara Thiers, NYBG Sophie Warny, LSU Tim White, Yale
Mission & Scope	This group is currently being formed. One of the group's first tasks will be to define a Mission and Scope. Broadly, the group will maintain awareness of digitization activities and needs within the Paleontology community, and promote communication between Neontology/Paleontology/Information Technology partners.
Overlap with Other Working Groups
Links

Cyberinfrastructure

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Andréa Matsunaga (Lead), iDigBio IT Alex Thompson, iDigBio IT Renato Figueiredo, iDigBio IT Jiangyan Xu, iDigBio IT Casey McLaughlin, iDigBio IT Guillaume Jimenez, iDigBio IT Edward Gilbert, Lichens&Bryophytes/Macrofungi/SCAN TCNs IT, Symbiota Corinna Gries, Lichens&Bryophytes TCN, PI Nahil Sobh, InvertNet TCN IT, Co-PI Omar Sobh, InvertNet TCN IT Michael Bevans, Tri-tropic TCN IT Tony Kirchgessner, Tri-trophic TCN IT, NYBG
Mission & Scope	Define, document and test iDigBio service Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and appliances. The first phase will focus on data ingestion APIs and appliances considering TCN use cases. Definition and documentation of potential services and appliances for OCR and georeferencing are left to the respective working groups. Definition of data structure for ingestion is left to MISC working group.
Overlap with Other Working Groups
Links	Cyberinfrastructure Working Group Wiki

Minimum Information Standards & Semantics

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Gil Nelson (Lead) Andrea Matsunaga Reed Beaman John Deck
Mission & Scope	1) Establish the working group and its goals, with the guidance of participants from the MISC breakout group from iDigBio's It Standards workshop. 2) Document basic assumptions underpinning a minimal information for scientific collections expectation. 3) Develop a document outlining and providing a rationale for required, minimal, desired, and supplementary data elements to be provided by iDigBio contributors. 4) Develop guidelines for data validation, training and assistance to iDigBio contributors for configuring data for ingestion into the iDigBio portal
Overlap with Other Working Groups	Potential overlap with authority files.
Links

Georeferencing Working Group (GWG)

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	John Wieczorek (Berkeley, MVZ) Nelson Rios (Tulane, GeoLocate) David Bloom (Berkeley, MVZ) Gil Nelson, iDigBio Digitization Deborah Paul, iDigBio User Services Reed Beaman Paul Heinrich (SCAN TCN, Co-PI) Una Farrell (Paleoniches TCN, Co-PI)
Mission & Scope	Our first goals are to start building a community of expert Georeferencing trainers in a workshop to be held in the fall or winter of 2012 and advance the capabilities of Georeferencing tools. Want to know more? Contact Deborah Paul
Overlap with Other Working Groups
Links	Discussion Forum , Working Group Wiki

Augmenting OCR (aOCR)

Data Field	Details
Status	Active
Members	Bryan Heidorn, (Chair), Univ of AZ Deborah Paul (Co-Chair), iDigBio User Services [qianjinzhang@email.arizona.edu Qianjin Zhang] Univ of AZ Renato Figueiredo, iDigBio IT Gil Nelson, iDigBio Digitization Jason Best (BRIT Apiary) Ed Gilbert (Symbiota, LBCC TCN) Nathan Gnanasambandam, (Xerox) Stephen Gottschalk, (NYBG TTD-TCN) Nahil Sobh, (InvertNet TCN) Elspeth Haston,(Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh) Peter Lang, (ABBYY)
Mission & Scope	Engage experts in the biodiversity and information technology fields to identify opportunities to broadly implement existing effective OCR tools and enhance existing Machine and Natural Language Processing technologies to meet the needs of the biodiversity community. Want to know more? Contact Bryan Heidorn or Deborah Paul
Overlap with Other Working Groups
Links

Inactive Working Groups

Intellectual Property Policy

Data Field	Details
Status	Inactive
Members	Gil Nelson (Lead) Deborah Paul David Giblin Katja Schultz Katja Seltmann Chris Dietrich Paul Stern John Fraser
Mission & Scope	Produce a clear Intellectual Property Policy to establish data ownership rights and data re-use requirements related to content presented via iDigBio by collections and institutions.
Overlap with Other Working Groups	None identified
Links	Final Published Document Note: This document is open for community comment