Phylogenetics Standards Interest Group Wiki

Welcome to the website of the TDWG Interest Group on Phylogenetics Standards.

Recent or Coming Events

We organized a workshop on "Steps towards a Minimum Information About a Phylogenetic Analysis (MIAPA) Standard" at the 2011 TDWG Conference in New Orleans, LA. The workshop took place on Monday, Oct 17, and Tuesday, Oct 18. The goal of the workshop was to determine how a future reporting standard for phylogenetic analyses can best serve biodiversity science and related research applications.

We also held a smaller meeting to continue work on the recently started Phyloreferencing standard initiative.

History

A first workshop was held at the 2008 TDWG Annual Meeting in Perth/Fremantle, Australia. A charter was finalized by Nico Cellinese and Hilmar Lapp, and approved in September 2009.

The 2008 workshop also resulted in a number of initial ideas for task groups, and was followed by a symposium during the main conference (see Session# 7 of the conference program) with six presentations covering needs for and obstacles caused by a lack of appropriate standards, as well as opportunities offered by standards emerging in the field.

In Spring 2009, NESCent hosted the Evolutionary Database Interoperability Hackathon. A group of collaborators who emerged from that event and subsequent activities articulated a vision for a grass-roots interoperability network for making evolutionary data broadly Web 3.0-compliant. This resulted in an NSF INTEROP grant proposal submission in July 2009. The proposal was declined from funding in March 2010.

At the 2009 TDWG conference a 4-day Phyloinformatics VoCamp aimed at collaborative development of vocabularies and ontologies took place, as well as a working session on the development of RegNum and the PhyloCode.

At the 2010 TDWG conference in Woods Hole, MA, we organized a full-day hands-on working meeting. One of its major outcomes is an in-depth report on Best Practices on Publishing Trees Electronically.

Getting Involved

We greatly welcome participation in any of the above and other activities. There is a mailing list (tdwg-phylo) open to anyone. If you have ideas for any of the above topics or would like to participate in whatever role, please get in touch with us - we would love to hear from you.

Links and Resources

• 2008 Phylogenetics Standards Workshop
• 2009 Evolutionary Database Interoperability Hackathon
• 2009 EvoIO NSF INTEROP proposal
• 2009 Phyloinformatics VoCamp
• 2010 Working Meeting 2010
• 2011 Workshop on Steps towards a Minimum Information About a Phylogenetic Analysis (MIAPA) Standard
• Mailing list: tdwg-phylo

Acknowledgments

The workshop and symposium at the 2008 TDWG Annual Meeting in Perth/Fremantle was co-sponsored by the Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC/EOL), the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent, NSF# EF-0423641), and TDWG.

The 2009 Evolutionary Database Interoperability Hackathon and Phyloinformatics VoCamp were sponsored by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent, NSF# EF-0423641). The VoCamp? received additional support from TDWG and LIRMM (University of Montpellier).