The purpose and function of the DGGTB (German Society for the History and Theory of Biology) is to promote the communication of the history and theory of all biological subjects by means of scientific events such as colloquia, symposia, working groups, and to foster scientific exchange between its members and younger developing scientists, to build up relationships with the corresponding foreign and domestic associations, especially in the neighbouring European states, and to build up and effectively represent publicly, common aims. Since, contrary to other countries in the European Community, and especially in contrast to the USA, there are no institutes or professorial chairs for the history and theory of biology in Germany the DGGTB advocates that the history and theory of biology be established as an independent field of work in biological research and teaching in all German universities that have a faculty of biology. ... [Information of the supplier, translated]
The Tephritid Workers Database (TWD) deals with fruit flies and was re-established from the Insect Pest Control Section of the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture to facilitate collection and sharing of data between researchers and other interested parties worldwide. It includes more than 1200 researchers and 5000 publications and be maintained by the participants. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
The long term (ten year) objectives for data management within the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are to: a) Transform collections of Australian research data into a cohesive network of research repositories, b) assist Australian research data managers to become experts in creating, managing and sharing research data under well formed and maintained data management policies, c) increase the amount of research data that is routinely deposited into stable, accessible and sustainable data management and preservation environments, d) Provide opportunities for people to develop expertise in data management across research communities and institutions, e) enable researchers to find and access any relevant data in the Australian 'data commons', f) enable Australian researchers to discover, exchange, reuse and combine data from other researchers and other domains within their own research in new ways and g) facilitate the sharing of Australian data to support international and nationally distributed multidisciplinary research teams. ... [Information of the supplier]
ViBRANT recognised the need for a bibliography of life, i.e. a freely accessible bibliography of every taxonomic paper ever published. None of the currently available aggregators were satisfactory, so we have chosen to extend the Plazi bibliographic tool, RefBank. There are two primary reasons for this choice, first the original developer, Guido Sautter, is a partner in ViBRANT and second, RefBank contains a parsing tool that will turn Rod Page's "cryptic text strings" into structured references that can be easily transformed into any of the other conventional forms (see the Data Format Report). The bulk of RefBank's growth to date has come from ViBRANT contributed references, with 80,000 references being accumulated in the first six months of operation and another 85,000 references in the second six months. Work continues within ViBRANT to extract bibliographies from published works and parse them to generate more references. This work is to ensure that RefBank is seeded with sufficient references at launch so as to engage users. There was a significant development for RefBank in Autumn 2012 when it was the subject of a presentation and demonstration at TDWG 2013. Since when we have seen the addition of community contributed references. A more formal launch of RefBank, probably in conjunction with related ViBRANT developed tools, is planned for Summer/Autumn 2013. (http://vbrant.eu/content/communal-literature) ... [Miscellaneous as indicated]
