Clarifying Concepts and Terms in Biodiversity Informatics

Two workshops (hereafter described as “workshops”) were held in 2012, which brought together domain experts from genomic and biodiversity informatics, information modeling and biology, to clarify concepts and terms at the intersection of these domains. These workshops grew out of efforts sponsored by the NSF funded Resource Coordination Network (RCN) project for GSC [ 1 ] (RCN4GSC, hosted at UCSD, with John Wooley as PI) to reconcile terms from the Darwin Core (DwC) [ 2 ] vocabulary and with those in the MIxS family of checklists (Minimum Information about Any Type of Sequence) [ 3 ]. The original RCN4GSC meetings were able to align many terms between DwC and MIxS, finding both common and complementary terms. However, deciding exactly what constitutes the concept of a sample, a specimen, and an occurrence [ 4 ] to satisfy the needs of all use cases proved difficult, especially given the wide variety of sampling strategies employed within and between communities. Further, participants in the initial RCN4GSC workshops needed additional guidance on how to relate these entities to processes that act upon them and the environments in which organisms live. These issues provided the motivation for the workshops described below.