Peter Schalk and Olaf Bánki (GBIF and CoL+) came to our group today. We had a short meeting to start connecting names from Catalogue of Life to original nomenclatural events collected in Biodiversity Heritage Library. We had a remote connection to folks from BHL (Joel Richard and Mike Lichtenberg), and CoL+ (Dave Remsen, Markus Doering).

Markus said that he will create a list of references for proto/basionyms in CoL+, and starting December I will start trying to connect the names from BHL to these references. If things work well, it will enhance usability of Col/Col+ and BHL as well.

Markus created today a gitter account that we can use for this project.

Olaf will set a weekly meetings through December-January to keep us all in sync for this project. Will be interesting to learn from IPNI about their approach of doing pretty much the same task.

We also had a good conversation with Peter, Ed Devalt and Olaf about importance of different biodiversity projects working together instead of trying to re-implement each other ‘wheels’. I would say there is definitely a progress in cooperation between different initiatives and it is good news for biodiversity informatics.