Next Meeting – Friday 20th April 10:00 am

April 4, 2007 at 3:58 pm | Posted in Forum | Leave a comment

The next meeting of the kikForum will be on Friday 20th April, 10:00 to 12:00 in the Pat Brenan Suite. Stuart Cable will give a talk on Probablistic Identification. We would also like to discuss what sort of keys / key projects Kew should/can develop. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Issues arising from last meeting

• Standard data formats
  While DELTA is both a standard and a software suite, CSIRO has withdrawn support and frozen development of this tool. DELTA still has the advantage that it is used natively by a number of Key tools and can be imported into Lucid format, while it is not easy to reverse this process. The 'new' TDWG standard, SDD is xml based and supports all of the necessary DELTA directives as well as a number of new features. SDD is however only supported by Lucid and the EFG project at the moment, but being an open standard it is hoped that it will gain a stronger foothold.
• Need for generic tools for Kew
  One of the presentations involved a map of Madagascar for choosing distribution and comments were raised at how this would be a really useful feature for all of Kew’s key projects and this raised the issue of reusable standard characters & states that apply across keys at Kew. The Malesian key project has had a number of characters and states illustrated and Kew holds the copyright for these and they are available for use. Other possible tools / data sources that would be useful in this respect include images from TOAD and specimen records from Herbcat.
• Extracting data from existing/developing data sources
  Extracting data from the some of Kew’s growing data sources such as the eFloras databases is possible but it does take a certain amount of manipulation to massage data into the right formats. This effort is however nowhere near as great as 'recoding' the data from original texts.