Friday, August 26, 2011

RCN working group meeting - Boulder, CO

Last June the Phenotype RCN organized a set of concurrent working group meetings—focused on arthropod anatomy, vertebrate anatomy, plant phenotypes, and the informatics associated with phenotype data and ontologies—that were very graciously hosted by by Google's office in Boulder, CO. The meeting agenda and subsequent notes are already posted on the Phenotype RCN website, though I noticed today that the arthropod anatomy working group summary never got posted!

The longer version is available as a Google doc. Here's the short version: We are working towards developing two higher-level anatomy ontologies, one for classes in common across Arthropoda and another for Insecta. We've identified a series of potential classes, proposed candidate definitions for notoriously difficult ones (what's a 'segment'?!), identified some tools we can use to facilitate communication (an email list, Dropbox, Google docs, Git), development (mx, Protégé) and visualization (C-Map, Vue), and identified several highly motivated people to collaborate with.

I'll also use this opportunity to thank our host at Google's Boulder office, John Day-Richter, for hosting what ended up being an inspirational, productive meeting! Our next group meeting is at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. Watch for more details!

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