Purpose

This workshop is designed to find new ways to build on the Marine Biological Laboratory's emerging strengths in bioinformatics, Arizona State University's projects in which informatics is a crucial part of the research, and the parallel work of partner institutions.  The MBL has been instrumental in building new technological and conceptual tools for research in several fields—aging, taxonomy, and biodiversity—while overlapping groups at ASU have been working on digital projects in the history of developmental biology and in history and philosophy of science more generally, as well as in species exploration remote microscopy, e-monography the production of e-types and other aspects of cybertaxonomy. At this workshop, participants will explore common technical issues and shared solutions, look for opportunities to build their projects collaboratively, and map out new areas for future development. While the MBL is creating new tools for the biology of aging and for biodiversity informatics (Encyclopedia of Life, UBIO, the Biodiversity Heritage Library), overlapping groups of researchers at ASU are building both a community-wide infrastructure for digital history and philosophy of science and a new set of standards for imaging and databasing electronic type specimens.  

Core Issues

These projects all face several core issues connected with the integration of different types of data, the most economical and feasible ways to digitize/acquire these data, best strategies for storing data, the best ways to annotate, analyze, and interpret these data and, finally, the most user-friendly ways to deliver data to multiple groups of end users in ways that best allow them to interact with and query the data. All these issues involve questions about databases, ontologies, digital workbenches, and web-based applications for collaborative work.  The taxonomy and biodiversity cases raise further questions about how to integrate with existing databases as well as with the data pipeline that runs from the individual researcher to the naming body to the database. This workshop will address these issues in a collaborative way, asking what new projects and partnerships should be formed as the participants and their respective institutions work toward common goals.