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Welcome to the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) 2018 Summer Meeting! The 2018 theme is Realizing the Socioeconomic Value of Data. The theme is based on one of the goals in the 2015 - 2020 ESIP Strategic Plan, which provides a framework for ESIP’s activities over the next three years.

All Presentations are being added to a Google Folder temporarily and then will be moved to FigShare and linked to the sessions here. 
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Thursday, July 19 • 11:30am - 1:00pm
Natural history museum informatics: new methods, old data

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Natural history museums and related databases (e.g. the Paleobiology database, GBIF, Neotoma, Pangea) house a wealth of rich data about our planet and its biological and geological history. Next generation, "Big Data" approaches (e.g. machine learning, network analysis, natural language processing) offer exciting new ways of analyzing this data (paleoinformatics! Network paleoecology! etc). However, museum data collections must be well curated and accessible in order to make this work possible; and informaticians using these data must be aware of public datasets’ potential limitations in their work.

In this session, we'll present recent work at the intersection of new computational methods and old data, and discuss the infrastructures, algorithms, curatorial workflows and other considerations needed for this work. We mean "old data" in both the geologic sense, and in the "this has been on a museum shelf for 100 years" sense, and anticipate that this session will be of interest to folks in paleontology, natural history museum collections management, data curation, and more.

We intend this to be an interactive session, aimed at fostering discussion and building community around natural history informatics projects. What projects are you working on that make use of data derived from museum specimens or physical samples? What new approaches are you using? What new methods would you like to use?

Tentative schedule:
Short talks
Introduction to and motivations for this session - Andrea Thomer
Quantifying ecological impacts of mass extinctions with network analysis of fossil communities - A.D. Muscante
Work on 3d fossil scans - Gary Motz
Physical samples and schema.org - Doug Fils

Discussion - convened by Peter Fox and Andrea Thomer

Notes doc: http://bit.ly/2L2O9Si
Speakers & Moderators
PF
avatar for Gary Motz

Gary Motz

Chief Information Officer, Assistant Director for Information Services, Indiana University | Indiana Geological and Water Survey
Gary is an earth scientist and curator of data, metadata, and natural history collections. In his role at the Indiana Geological and Water survey, he oversees the information services division which provides cartographic, information technology, cyberinfrastructure, data science... Read More →
avatar for Andrea Thomer

Andrea Thomer

Assistant Professor, University of Michigan School of Information
I'm an information scientist interested in biodiversity and earth science informatics, natural history museum data, data curation, information organization, and computer-supported cooperative work! 

Thursday July 19, 2018 11:30am - 1:00pm PDT
Canyon B
  Canyon B, Breakout Session

Attendees (31)