Taxacom: 16th Annual Biocuration Conference 2023: Literature curation for taxonomic databases

[Peter Uetz]

The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) will hold its next annual meeting in Padua, Italy, in April 2023.
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The society and its members are primarily dealing with the theory and practice of curating scientific data into biomedical databases. However, taxonomic databases are largely absent from ISB, despite the fact that they deal with exactly the same problem as any other scientific database, namely to get the vast amount of literature into a FAIR format (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). While taxonomic databases are well represented at organizations such as TDWG, they need more representation in ISB. Oddly, TDWG seems to have no curation group.

As a member of the Scientific Program Committee I wonder if any curators of taxonomic databases are interested in holding a special workshop or session at the ISB meeting. The workshop would deal with the problem of how to curate taxonomic data, but also with standards for data types and processes (including automation, such as text mining). Other topics are certainly welcome and encouraged and may overlap with the purview of TDWG, such as the interaction with other entities such as ICZN, Zoobank, NCBI / GenBank, VertNet, iDigBio, GBIF etc and the use of identifiers to connect these data sources.

It may be financially prohibitive for many to attend the meeeting in person, so the ISB has also established a series of (free!) online meetings and workshops throughout the year (dates for 2023 to be determined). So, if you cannot attend the meeting in Italy, let me know if you are interested in an online meeting. We would be interested in both speakers and attendees (who are not presenting but like to be involved in discussions etc.).

That said, organizing and coordinating taxonomic databases may also lead to joint publications and funding :)

Please respond privately unless you have public comments or questions.

Thanks,

	Peter



PS: the 2024 meeting of the ISB most likely will be in India.

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Peter Uetz
Center for Biological Data Science
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284
USA

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