[SEEK-Taxon] Taxon conference call

[Nico Franz]

Hi all:

    I'm starting to travel on Friday morning but am available all Thursday. 
With respect to the software tools, I'd like us to discuss the possibility 
of building an interface to hook our database up to Mesquite (developed by 
the Maddison brothers). I attached some links to screenshots etc. 
Systematists have been using this program or its predecessor MacClade for 
almost 20 years. If you read through the motivation you'll find that the 
authors seem to ASK for connections/contributions from "outsiders" anyway 
(http://mesquiteproject.org/Mesquite_Folder/docs/mesquite/whyMesquite.html). 
They talk about a "modular approach." Mesquite handles characters, taxa, 
and has ample tree display options. It would need an additional 
multi-taxonomy connecting module. It is a desktop tool and to my knowledge 
not designed to feed into a networked database system. Still, most of the 
tree displays Mesquite produces already routinely make it into print in 
systematic journals, something we cannot say about OWL-type ontology 
displays. So I think this is worth exploring before we build something from 
scratch.

Cheers,

Nico

http://mesquiteproject.org/mesquite/mesquite.html
http://mesquiteproject.org/mesquite/features.html#analyses
http://mesquiteproject.org/mesquite/indianaTalk/screenshots.html
http://comet.lehman.cuny.edu/treeviz/



At 06:26 PM 10/26/2004 -0400, Robert K. Peet wrote:

>Hi Amy,
>
>My availability:
>
>Thursday  14:00-16:00 EDT  =  18:00-20:00 UTC
>           17:30-23:00 EDT  =  21:30-02:00 UTC
>
>Friday    13:00-14:40 EDT  =  17:00-18:40 UTC
>           16:00-23:00 EDT  =  20:00-02:00 UTC
>
>Agenda
>    Initial population of a taxonomic concept database
>    Software tools designed to lure systematists to contribute concepts
>
>Bob
>
>  ======================================================================
>      Robert K. Peet, Professor & Chair         Phone:  919-962-6942
>      Curriculum in Ecology, CB#3275            Fax:    919-962-6930
>      University of North Carolina              Cell:   919-368-4971
>      Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3275  USA          Email:  peet at unc.edu
>
>                    http://www.unc.edu/depts/ecology/
>                  http://www.bio.unc.edu/faculty/peet/
>  ======================================================================