This year, the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (CTEC) and the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) will host the TDWG annual conference in La Fortuna, Costa Rica, December 5-9, 2016. The focus is not only on supporting research, decision making, and communication of biodiversity information, but also on how standards can support innovative research. To what extent do our standards promote innovation, and does the most innovative research show us where our standards need to be refined and extended? Current research, both in Computer Science (e.g., deep learning, computer vision, ambient computing) and Biodiversity Sciences, offers excellent opportunities for multidisciplinary innovative synergies among researchers, decision makers, students, and citizen scientists.
Symposia and workshops addressing the conference theme (see above) are encouraged, but other topics are also welcomed, such as:
- semantics and ontologies (e.g., sampling, traits);
- biological field station data management;
- standards for open data;
- citizen science;
- data visualization;
- data quality assessment and improvement;
- agricultural biodiversity;
- conservation informatics;
- phyloinformatics;
- ePublications; and
- standards for image processing (e.g. computer vision for organismal identification).