Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Museum of Nature will host the 2017 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference in Ottawa. The theme for this year's event announces its focus: 'Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments.'
The annual conference serves as
- a forum for extending, refining, and developing standards in response to new challenges and opportunities
- a showcase for biodiversity informatics, much of which relies on the specifications provided by TDWG and other standards organizations
Data Integration in a Big Data Universe: Associating Occurrences with Genes, Phenotypes, and Environments.
Associating genotypes with phenotypes has been the subject of previous TDWG symposia, and remains one of the great ongoing challenges of biodiversity science. It is complicated by our increased (but still nascent) understanding of the role played by microbiomes in phenotype expression.
The theme is intended to provoke discussion around questions such as:
- Can current systems, methods, and schemas be used to capture and understand patterns of association amongst occurrences, genes, phenotypes, and environments?
- If so, how?
- If not, what gaps need to be filled?
