Meeting? Summary Convener: G. Hagedorn The BD interest group meetings consisted of a working session dedicated to the Species Profile Model (SPM) task group, convened by C. Parr (reported separately), and two open sessions with a mixture of speakers and discussion (following slides) Key topics were the exchange of information and progress notes on Algorithms, Automated markup of natural language descriptions, and progress notes on currently available identification tools. A major interest was to find synergies between the dispersed groups. Result of discussions: 1.Finalize a vocabulary for organism interactions (parasitism, pollinators, etc.), extending the specimen-based TaxonOccurrenceInteraction vocabulary (Kevin Richards) TaxonOccurrenceInteraction vocabulary 2.Action about patenting of prior art in identification tools, in part by: 3.Forming a new collaboration platform, for interest in species description and identification Biological Descriptions Interest Group

Meeting? BDI SESSION 1 (brief talks) Zhimin Wang (University of Massachussetts/Boston, USA, talk presented by Bob Morris): Generating polytomous trees from character matrices using generalized Information Gain. (5 Minutes) Vincent Smith & Kehan Harman (NHM London, UK): Scratchpad news: A first version of a web-based matrix editor (5 Minutes) Philippe Birnbaum (Cirad, France): a flexible software for the management and share of data on plants (5 Minutes) Ben Richardson (Western Australia): Java, SDD and possible revitalization of DELTA Mircea Giurgiu & Andrei Homodi (UT Cluj Napoli, Romania): IBIS-ID, an Adobe FLEX based identification tool for SDD-encoded multi- access keys. (5 Minutes) Biological Descriptions Interest Group

Meeting? BDI SESSION 2 (brief talks) Hong Cui, James Macklin, Chunshui Yu, Partha Pratim Sanyal (presenting author): Fine-Grained Semantic Markup of Descriptive Data for Knowledge Applications in Biodiversity Domains (15 minutes) Pierre Grard et al. (Cirad, France): The graphic approach of the plant identification (5 Minutes) Ramesh, B.R., N. Ayyappan, D. Balasubramanian and P. Grard (IFP, India et al.): Biodiversity Informatics and co-Operation in Taxonomy for Interactive shared Knowledge base (BIOTIK) - (10 Minutes) Gregor Hagedorn and Stephan Opitz (JKI Berlin, Germany): The jKey wiki key player and builder (5 Minutes) Regine Vignes-Lebbe et al. (UPMC Paris, France): Updates to status of xper2 (5 Minutes) Biological Descriptions Interest Group