BioGeo interoperability task group charter

Note: this charter is under development. Most of it had not been discussed so do not consider this page and information point about the task group for the moment.

1. The NAME of the Task Group

We still need to discss this, go to the first page to see what is going on

2. VERSION HISTORY of the Charter document

Version Draft, October 21, 2006, TDWG Annual meeting, St Louis Missouri Draft moved to Wiki

3. CONVENER

It was proposed in TDWG 2006 that Javier de la Torre becomes the convener of the task group, if there is any other suggestion please comment on the mailing list

Javier de la Torre

IMASTE-IPS
Antonio Machado, 17 - 28700
Madrid, Spain
jatorre [at] gmail.com

4. MEMBERS

Name	TWiki User	Email
Javier de la Torre	JavierTorre	jatorre@gmailREMOVE-THIS.com
Patricia Mergen	PatriciaMergen	patricia.mergen@africamuseumREMOVE-THIS.be
Tim Sutton	TimSutton	tim@linfinitiREMOVE-THIS.com
Aimee Stewart	AimeeStewart	astewart@REALLYSTOPkuREMOVE-THIS.edu

5. HOME ADDRESS

Temporaily we can use the Wiki as the official home page http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/Geospatial/GeoAppInter

6. PURPOSE

The purpose of the Geospatial Applications and Interoperability Task Group is to foster accessibility to Biogeography related information to the broadest audience possible. To achieve this objective the group will assess interoperability between TDWG standards and applications with existing OGC services. In a second step, ways will be proposed and tested to enhance interoperability between these two bodies.

7. BACKGROUND

In biodiversity conservation easy access to geographic information and distribution maps in re-usable formats has been identified as a major need in many end-user and stakeholders surveys. Recent species observational data are usually accurately georeferenced by GPS devices. Older records, which originally had no geographic coordinates can be properly georeferenced by using available gazetteers, maps and additional information to accurately pinpoint the sampling sites. Numerous atlases have been published showing species distribution ranges. Many are completed by valuable habitat description layers like protected areas, soil occupation, geological or meteorological information. This existing information is of high value for a large number of stakeholders in nature conservation. Several activities in recent and ongoing projects have successfully enabled access to geographic information for specific groups of end-users, by implementing GIS webportals using OGC (INSPIRE) compliant GIS software. The goal of this task group is to provide global and generalized access to biodiversity-linked geographical data. It will offer open and non-proprietary standard GIS services (like WMS, WFS or WCS) in an user-friendly and interoperable way in form of a Biogeography Spatial Data Infrastructure (BioGeoSDI?).

8. SCOPE

What is in scope?

• Enhance interoperability between TDWG protocols and provider software used in networks like GBIF and BioCASE? and OGC compliant Web services
• Test if OGC web services if can cope with the geospatial information as it is presented in the TDWG data “standards” like ABCD or the geospatial extension of DarwinCore?.
• Visualization and Access of Biogeography related information in a way that is useful to both communities via a Spatial Data Infrastructure
• In parallel to the OGC compliant Spatial Data Infrastructures, interoperability with popular and widely used tools like GoogleEarth? and NASA World Wind will also be considered, which are already at least partially OGC compliant.

What is not in scope?

• Domain specific ontologies
• Conceptual modeling

9. AUDIENCE

The target users are researcher, conservationists, environmental decision makers as well as the public at large, who need better access to re-usable biogeographical information in form of species distribution maps and related habitat layers. This kind of information is needed for to increase the efficiency of analytical research and for re-use in modeling tools. An user-friendly and quick but accurate map visualisation interface with printer-friendly options is reported as a major need of conservationists and decision makers in their daily work.

10. OUTPUTS and OUTCOMES

Output/outcome	Version	Timeframe
TBD	TBD	TBD

11. STRATEGY

Output/outcome	Version	Timeframe
TBD	TBD	TBD

-- JavierTorre - 24 Oct 2006