Outreach activities have been the main focal point so far in Autumn 2013.
ENVIRONMENTS, ENVIRONMENTS-EOL, and the sister project SPECIES have been presented at an invited talk at the BioCreative IV workshop (7 - 9 October, Washington DC, US) as part of a DOE-funded Discussion Panel on Metagenomics.
Bridging the metagenomics and text mining communities e.g. by employing text mining techniques to support standards-compliant sequence metadata annotation was one of the main discussion points.
The Biocreative IV workshop proceedings including opinions on the previous point are available here (see Volume 1, pages 279-291).
On behalf of the ENVIRONMENTS-EOL team a big thank you to the BioCreative organizers.
At the time of writing, the Biodiversity Information Standards Conference (TDWG 2013, 28 Oct - 1 Nov, Firenze), is on-going.
ENVIRONMENTS-EOL will be be presented this Friday (1st Nov, 11:20) in the "Interoperability with genomic and ecological semantics" session of the Semantics for Biodiversity Symposium of TDWG2013 (Travel made possible thanks to EOL Rubenstein Fellows Program's funding).
In parallel and while the benchmarking algorithms are being prepared, the ENVIRONMENTS-600 (E600) corpus returned by the curators (see August's post) underwent housekeeping processing e.g. by removing any errors that had been introduced during the manual curation such as missing tabs in the annotation items, flag misspellings and others.
A mountain range (ENVO:00000080) as seen on board a flight from Münich, Germany to Florence, Italy to attend TDWG2013. Could it be the Dolomite mountain range?