27th January 2025
Hosted by our colleagues from the University of Tartu last 21-22 January 2025, DiSSCo’s latest technical workshop carries the title ” DiSSCo Data Management Plan for Machine Actionability and Standards for Taxon Hypotheses”. As you can infer from the title, there is a lot to unpack here, so we had the workshop over two days with its respective distinct sessions.
Day 1 focused on DiSSCo’s Data Management Plan for machine actionability. The talk provided an overview and discussion of DiSSCo Transition deliverable D3.3, followed by a demonstration of DMP implementation on the PlutoF platform. You can watch it all in the video below.
Day 2 of the DiSSCo Transition workshop on DiSSCo’s DMP and Standards for Taxon Hypotheses focused on the standards aimed to provide a better understanding of the Taxon Concept Schema -or TCS– and the significant modifications introduced by the TCS 2 Task Group (Klazenga and Liljeblad, 2024). These updates enable the schema to accommodate taxon hypotheses (TH), especially those that lack formally described taxon names (Kõljalg et al., 2020).
The workshop explored how taxonomic circumscriptions can be expressed in TCS 2, with a focus on how it supports the characterisation and practical application of DNA-based THs.
Additionally, Taxonomic Data Objects (Upham and Poelen 2024) — digital, machine-actionable taxonomic references — and their integration within an open, infrastructure-focused framework (Islam et al., 2024) were addressed in the context of this topic.
References:
Buckley, T. R. (2024). Charting a future for entomological taxonomy in New Zealand. In New Zealand Entomologist (pp. 1–17). Informa UK Limited. https://doi.org/10.1080/00779962.2024.2407230
Islam, S. (2024). Commentary on “Preliminary Species Hypotheses” in Entomological Taxonomy: A Global Data and FAIR Infrastructure Perspective. Pensoft Publishers.
https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e141578
Klazenga, N., & Liljeblad, J. (2024). Expressing Circumscription in the Taxon Concept Schema. In Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (Vol. 8). Pensoft Publishers.
https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.8.140738
Kõljalg, U., Nilsson, H. R., Schigel, D., Tedersoo, L., Larsson, K.-H., May, T. W., Taylor, A. F. S., Jeppesen, T. S., Frøslev, T. G., Lindahl, B. D., Põldmaa, K., Saar, I., Suija, A., Savchenko, A., Yatsiuk, I., Adojaan, K., Ivanov, F., Piirmann, T., Pöhönen, R., … Abarenkov, K. (2020). The Taxon Hypothesis Paradigm—On the Unambiguous Detection and Communication of Taxa. In
Microorganisms (Vol. 8, Issue 12, p. 1910). MDPI AG.
https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms8121910
Upham, N.S., Poelen, J. (2024). Taxonomic Data Objects for Communicating the Meaning of Species Names. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards (8: e139413).
https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.8.139413
Do you want to know more about the technical side of DiSSCo? DiSSCo puts different technical knowledge platforms at the scientific community’s disposal:
DiSSCoTech: Get the latest technical posts about the design of DiSSCo’s Infrastructure
DiSSCo Labs: A preview of experimental services and demonstrators by the DiSSCo community
DiSSCo GitHub: Code hosting for DiSSCo software, version control and collaboration
DiSSCo Modelling Framework: A WikiBase tool that is configured to create an abstraction of the DiSSCo data model