Autumn 2015
I am happy to circulate this fourth BEDIC/Biodiversity Informatics newsletter. As you will notice, BEDIC members have been quite active in the last few months, so I hope you can find a few moments to browse through this newsletter.
I would also like to draw your attention to the pre-announcement of our “Data Matters” event, which is planned for Monday the 7th of December. Please mark your calendars!
This newsletter is circulated to the OD Nature mailing list and distributed to selected contacts from other ODs. Please feel free to circulate this newsletter among your colleagues from other ODs and alert me at aaike.dewever@naturalsciences.
OD Nature launched the Marine Mammals portal - www.marinemammals.be - during the Science Day in Temse on September 11th. This website is the result of a long-standing collaboration between RBINS and the University of Liège and provides access to data from 50 years of marine mammal observations in Belgium. The site consists of two main parts, i.e. observations and the tissue bank (biobank). While observations can be publicly consulted, the biobank is focussed on scientific users. Overall, the website aids in collecting data on strandings, necropsies, ad hoc observations and surveys of marine mammals. Ad hoc stranding and observational data are entered by RBINS staff. Thanks to Marinemammals.be ad hoc stranding event parameters from Belgium and Northern France are collected in a standardised way. The system allows to track multiple stranding events of individual animals. In order to support and refine the cause of death as assessed on the beach, necropsies and resulting samples are recorded as well. The system also keeps track of all the marine mammal tissue samples stored in the vaults of the Department of Morphology and Pathology of the ULg, which contain over 19000 samples. In the near future, marine veterinarians and biologists interested in lending out samples will be able to register on the site and browse trough the available samples.
In September, the core team of the mARS project (Anton Van de Putte, Alison Murray, Nabil Youdjou and Bruno Danis) met in Brussels to discussed the next phase of mARS developments. In October we will start a period of dedicated development in the framework of an international ERANET project ‘Methanobase’ (METHAnogenic Biodiversity and activity in Arctic and Subantarctic Ecosystems affected by climate change). This project will allow us to make significant progress in accomplishing step 4 of the mARS vision of processing batch sequence data (see this pdf for more background info). The aim is to present these developments at the next SCAR Open Science conference 20-30 August 2016 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In the meantime the mARS team is happy to help you register your project and data related to Antarctic microbiology within the mARS infrastructure.
From the 28th to the 30th of September, taxonomic experts working on freshwater, marine and Antarctic species checklist gathered in Brussels to discuss the construction of such checklists and their exchange between the existing species registers WoRMS, RAMS and FADA. This meeting with 29 participants presented an opportunity to demonstrate tools for data entry & checklist quality control developed in the framework of AquaRES, initiated a roadmap for the construction of an Antarctic species register and ideas for a series of joint papers involving both marine and freshwater experts.
Serge Scory, Nabil Youdjou and Thomas Vandenberghe participated in the 5th ODIP workshop from September 28th until October 1st in Paris. The Ocean Data Interoperability Platform is a consortium of marine data management organisations aiming to improve the effective sharing of data across scientific domains and international boundaries. It convenes twice a year with an international workshop to foster the development of common standards and to develop prototypes to evaluate and test selected potential standards and interoperability solutions. In very broad terms, the first prototype focused on web services, the second, the current one, focuses on vocabularies and linked data and the third will focus on Big data and the sensor web.
Thematic Sessions focussed on vocabularies and semantic web technologies, model workflows and big data, and data publication and persistent identifiers. Noteworthy in the semantic web area is the endeavour of the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) to start atomising its famous P01 vocabulary into its constituents and the renewal of the NERC vocabulary service.
The final meeting of SeaDataNetII (SDN) took place at the IFREMER centre in Brest, France on September 16-17. Over 94 participants were present, of which Ruth Lagring and Serge Scory for the BMDC. During the two day meeting, each work package (10 in total) presented its progress and outcomes. In particular, RBINS-BMDC presented the lessons learned from the two training sessions it organised together with the IODE project office as well as climatologies of temperature and salinity of the Norh Sea computed using the DIVA software and data available in the SeaDataNet pool.
Good news was that since the beginning of the project all metadata catalogues (CSR, EDMO, EDMED and EDMERP) have increased. New is the CSR (Cruise Summary Reports) harvesting using the GeoNetworks, which now has four operational datacenters and soon other pilot candidates, inter alia the BMDC. Since it was the final meeting, a lot of attention was paid to the future. This was also the main concern of the advisory board: what will be the sustainability of results of the project and how will it be coordinated? How will technical problems be tackled in the future and will there be an expansion of SDN standards? With this in view, Serge has been officially appointed to work on the creation of a SeaDataNet aisbl/ivzw and draft statutes have already been circulated. The whole SDN-consortium agrees on one thing: SeaDataNext will continue! (Among others by answering to the H2020 call to be launched mid-October)
ERA-Can+ promotes cooperation between the European Union and Canada in science, technology and innovation with a broad range of activities.
Both common interests and the signing of the trilateral Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation lead to the organisation of a symposium on Arctic and marine research infrastructure in 2013 that brought together 40 senior granting agency officials, research infrastructure managers and leading researchers from across Europe, the United States and Canada.
Since the first Symposium, the USA-Canada-EU Arctic Working Group and the USA-Canada-EU Marine Working Group have both signed ‘statements of purpose’, confirming their intent to work towards the leveraging of opportunities for the shared use of infrastructure and installations. A second workshop was therefore organised to: - Continue the high-level discussions on how a coherent international scientific planning process can be developed; - Assess the progress made to date by the various agencies, organisations, and working groups involved; - Identify and prioritise next steps in moving the discussions forward, and more generally, - Further the core objectives of the Galway Statement to foster cooperation and collaboration, notably regarding use and access to research infrastructures, in areas of common scientific interest between the three signatories.
Serge Scory participated in this workshop on request of the EU Commission for presenting the H2020 project “ODIP” during the “Example of on-going and emerging international cooperation” plenary session. This presentation and discussions afterwards permitted to get in touch with potential Canadian partners for ODIP and the so-called “SeaDataNext proposal” in the field of “big data” and parameters related to sea-ice.
- Pre-announcement - Save the date!: BEDIC is currently preparing a “Data Matters” event on December 7th. With this event we want to reach all RBINS scientists to discuss data related topics and discuss how BEDIC could assist in terms of data management planning and support.
- The following “Empowering Biodiversity Research” workshops coordinated by the Belgian Biodiversity Platform still have spaces available: ** Data Paper workshop (Friday the 13th of November) ** (LifeWatch) Data analysis workshop (November 26-27) ** See www.biodiversity.be/
conference2015/workshops/ for more info. - OpenAIRE workshop: Sharing research data and open access to publications in H2020 event on Wednesday the 18th of November in Gent. See here for more info.
- Polar Data Forum II ‘International Collaboration for Advancing Polar Data Access and Preservation’ - 27 to 29 October 2015, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Please contact me at aaike.dewever@naturalsciences.
FYI. BEDIC newsletters are also be posted on the OD Nature wiki (log-in required).
With best regards,
Aaike De Wever
OD Nature