[Data-Mongers] Noon Monday, 12/5 Informatics Talk - N. Wilson - Semantic Vernaculars for Fungi

[Holly Miller]

The next Informal Lunch Talk will be:

When:  Noon, Monday, December 5, 2011
Where: Candle House 104/105 on the MBL Campus (map)
Who: Nathan Wilson, Director of the Center for Library and Informatics, MBL and Director of the Biodiversity Informatics Component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)
Title: Semantic Vernaculars for Fungi

About the talk:

The identification of Fungi to species often requires specialized equipment ranging from light microscope to DNA sequencing technology.  This creates a significant hurdle for meaningful amateur contributions to mycology.  The idea of a "Semantic Vernacular" is to provide an alternative framework for names that are well defined within the context of the semantic web and are complementary to the traditional scientific naming system.  The talk will present some compelling motivating examples and some initial work done in collaboration with class project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

About the speaker:

Nathan Wilson is the Director of the Center for Library and Informatics at the Marine Biological Laboratory  (MBL) and Director of the Biodiversity Informatics Component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).  For the EOL he leads the technical team responsible for the software development and hardware infrastructure for the project.  He is a software professional and an avid field naturalist specializing in fungi.  Prior to coming to the MBL, Nathan was a software architect and manager in the R&D department at DreamWorks Animation where he focused on collaboration tools and open source software.  He has also worked for Digital Domain, Apple Computer and SRI International as well as some Silicon Valley startups.  He has an masters degree in computer science from University of California, Santa Cruz where his thesis described using computers to identify fungi and an masters degree in experimental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.  His interests in computers, fungi and citizen science has led him to create several mushroom related websites including the Mushroom Observer (http://mushroomobserver.org).

The Monday Lunch talks are held every other Monday. We have created a wiki page for these and other Informatics events in Woods Hole. Please consider giving a talk, we have lot's of openings in 2012! Let us know if you about any informatics related event and we will add it to this page. Those of you who haven't subscribed to the Informatics discussion list, you might want to. Information on how to subscribe is on the wiki page above.

See you there!

Holly Miller 
hmiller at mbl.edu

Anne Thessen 
athessen at eol.org

Andrew Maffei 
amaffei at whoi.edu

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