BigDig: High-Throughput Digitization for Natural History Collections (BigDig
2017)
held as part of eScience 2017, Auckland, NZ, October 2017
http://press3.mcs.anl.gov/bigdig/
*********** DEADLINE EXTENDED: 14 JULY 2017 ***********
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The BigDig workshop (http://press3.mcs.anl.gov/bigdig/) will be held on 24
October 2017 in conjunction with the 13th IEEE International Conference on
eScience, Auckland, New Zealand. It will focus on high-throughput digitization,
driven by the keen need to move the world's physical collections into the
digital realm where they are safer from the ravages of time, can be used by
larger numbers of scientists and the public, and can contribute in new ways to
the study of biodiversity.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
* Digitization technologies for high-throughput 2D and 3D capture of collection
objects
* Instrumentation strategies and algorithms
* Specimen handling, label information capture, OCR, crowd-sourced label
transcription, 3D reconstruction
* Digitization requirements, metadata, image and 3D fidelity, time and resource
constraints, speed
* Workflows for high-throughput digitization of natural history collections
* Data management for large and perhaps distributed digital collections of such
data
* Interface requirements, issues, and solutions both for scientific research
and for public outreach to extremely large virtual collections
* Applications of the resulting data resource to potentially new science and
approaches as evidenced by theoretical models, case studies, parallels with
existing similar data resources
There is a wealth of untapped potential captured in the animal and plant
collections held by museums of natural history around the world. Novel
discovery processes will be catalyzed by the existence of large, curated,
inter-comparable digital collections of specimen data. However, it has been
noted that current methods may not be able to digitize the existing backlog of
an estimated ~1.5 billion specimens, distributed across 1000+ collections, in
the next 30 years or more. Obtaining information on labels of 500 million
entomological specimens is particularly challenging. It may even be impossible
to keep up with the rate of expansion of these collections as new specimens are
added. Despite successful ongoing efforts, more needs to be done in terms of
technology development across the ingest pipeline in order to meet this
daunting challenge. Therefore, it is important and timely that a workshop of
practitioners continues to expand upon discussion of how to advance the
technology of high-throughput specimen digitization and ingest to match the
requirements of this complex but ultimately richly rewarding problem.
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Authors are invited to submit unpublished, original work, using the IEEE 8.5 x
11 manuscript guidelines: double-column text using single-spaced 10-point font
on 8.5 x 11 inch pages. Templates are available from
http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.
We will be accepting submissions for:
* Full research papers for oral presentation (up to 10 pages) will focus on new
research achievements in high throughput digitization methods, technologies,
and applications.
* Experience papers for oral presentation (up to 10 pages) will focus on
practical outcomes of applying high throughput digitization to existing
collections.
* Poster submissions may focus on early stage results with the aim of fostering
exchange of ideas and professional networking (up to 2 pages). IMPORTANT NOTE:
Posters will be submitted directly thru the main eScience conference:
http://escience2017.org.nz/submissions/call-for-papers/.
Authors of papers (not posters) should submit a PDF to
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bigdig2017. It is a requirement that
at least one author of each accepted paper attend the conference.
Important Dates (midnight anywhere on Earth):
* Submission Due: Friday, 14 July 2017 **** NEW ***
* Notification of Acceptance: Friday, 11 August 2017 **** NEW ***
* Camera Ready Due: Friday, 15 August, 2017 **** NEW ***
BigDig 2017 proceedings will be included in the eScience 2017 proceedings to be
published by the IEEE Computer Society Press, USA and made available online
through the IEEE Digital Library.
Contact: All questions about submissions should be emailed to
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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