There was a short meeting about Catalogue of Life future directions organized at Species File Group at Champaign/Urbana. Concerning Global Names it was a very productive meeting. It was great to understand the current state of Catalogue of Life, to see that CoL is not loosing momentum inspite of financial problems of biodiversity informatics in general. There was definitely interest in creating more bridges between various projects.

Yuri Roskov did present a ‘pilot’ project of cooperation between Encyclopeia of Life species pages group and CoL. Data about ~2000 species of scorpions had been harvested from html-based site to be used in both projects. I think it was a great exercise and I do hope it will be just the first example of such cooperation.

From the point of Global Names there were good news too. I think it was everybody’s feeling that Global Names resolution is an important complementary service for Catalogue of Life. Cooperation between various biodiversity projects was brought up again and again, and organizing biodiversity infrastructure as a mix of several projects where GBIF, EOL, CoL, GN etc work as modules of a bigger puzzle, complement and enhance each other.

One thing that was brought up is lack of nomenclatural component in GN. I talked about our plans to integrate GN Usage Bank and GN Resolver and demonstrate the flow of nomenclatural data into resolution/reconciliation process. We will try to make such connection by November and demonstrate the workflow on upcoming GBIF/CoL workshop.