Genealogy of Life (GoLife) NSF.
Full Proposal Deadline Date: March 26, 2014
Fourth Wednesday in March, Annually Thereafter
Synopsis:
All of comparative biology depends on knowledge of the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of living and extinct organisms. In addition, understanding biodiversity and how it changes over time is only possible when Earth’s diversity is organized into a phylogenetic framework. The goals of the Genealogy of Life (GoLife) program are to resolve the phylogenetic history of life and to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal data.
The ultimate vision of this program is an open access, universal Genealogy of Life that will provide the comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and other fields. A further strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological and temporal data will produce a grand synthesis of biodiversity and evolutionary sciences. The resulting knowledge infrastructure will enable synthetic research on biological dynamics throughout the history of life on Earth, within current ecosystems, and for predictive modeling of the future evolution of life.
Projects submitted to this program should emphasize increased efficiency in contributing to a complete Genealogy of Life and integration of various types of organismal data with phylogenies.
This program also seeks to broadly train next generation, integrative phylogenetic biologists, creating the human resource infrastructure and workforce needed to tackle emerging research questions in comparative biology. Projects should train students for diverse careers by exposing them to the multidisciplinary areas of research within the proposal.
You may have noticed the emphasis on data integration:
to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal data.
comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and other fields
strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological and temporal data
synthetic research on biological dynamics
integration of various types of organismal data with phylogenies
next generation, integrative phylogenetic biologists
That sounds like a tall order! Particularly if your solution does not enable researchers to ask on what basis data was integrated as it was and by who?
If you can’t ask and answer those two questions, the more data and integration you mix together, the more fragile the integration structure will become.
I’m not trying to presume that such a project will use dynamic merging because it may well not. “Merging” in topic map terms may well be an operation ordered by a member of a group of curators. It is the capturing of the basis for that operation that makes it maintainable over a series of curators through time.
I first saw this at: Data sharing, OpenTree and GoLife, which I am about to post on but thought the NSF call merited a separate post as well.
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