Natural History Museum, London

<h3>Brief Description</h3> <p>The NHM is one of the foremost natural history museums in the world. In addition to its well-known public galleries, exhibition and education programmes, it employs over 300 researchers and curators who work with study collections of 70 million specimens and libraries holding more than 1 million books and 20,000 scientific journals. It has an excellent track record for delivering on EU-funded projects (BioCISE, BioCASE, ENHSIN, ENBI, among others). Its scientists sit on a number of international advisory groups and it welcomes visiting scientists through the SYNTHESYS programme.</p> <h3>Role / Commitment in ALICE</h3> <p>The NHM will contribute to WP2 (Understanding text content), where we will build on the experiences gained from the Innotaxa and ABLE projects, and to WP7 (User interface) where we will co-ordinate development of the Scratchpad environment as the software platform that links project elements directly to users.</p> <h3>Relevant experience</h3> <p>The NHM managed the highly successful Synthesys project and continues to manage its successor, also called Synthesys. The NHM also plays a leading roles in other current projects, with workpackage leaders in both EDIT and PESI.</p> <h3>Profile (qualifications & experience) of individuals undertaking the work</h3> <p><strong>Dr Dave Roberts: </strong> Currently workpackage leader responsible for "Unifying Revisionary Taxonomy on the Web" in the EU-funded EDIT project, and routinely chairs the EDIT network steering committee (the principal project management committee). He is Head of Microbiology in the NHM's Department of Zoology. Other recent grants include a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (with Dr Jun Gong) and a JISC project to develop concept extraction methods from scanned literature targeting the biodiversity domain. Working with Nozomi "James" Ytow and David Morse, Roberts established the influential Nomencurator project.</p> <p><strong>Simon Rycroft: </strong> Currently lead software developer for the Scratchpad project, Rycroft has lead the technical development of the Scratchpads. He has also worked on other Bioinformatics based projects, including Morphbank, Biocorder, and SID (Specimen Image Database).</p> <p><strong>Dr Chris Lyal: </strong> Systematist at the NHM, specialising on weevil taxonomy, nomenclature and morphology. He is administrator of a weevil community scratchpad and Co-PI in the WTAXA project to compile a nomenclatural catalogue of the ca.70,000 weevil species; this is currently supplied to Catalogue of Life and thus GBIF and EoL. In addition to systematics research, he is a Co-PI in the development of the INOTAXA project which is focussing on development of an XML schema for taxonomic Lyal is a leading member of the TDWG working group on standards for taxonomic Literature. He has also been engaged with GBIF since its inception; and is the UK National Focal Point for the CBD’s Global Taxonomy Initiative.</p> <p><strong>Dr Vince Smith: </strong> Cybertaxonomist at the NHM, and an expert in louse taxonomy, Smith’s primary research focus on the development of digital infrastructures supporting taxonomic research. He has published extensively on both topics, and coordinates the Scratchpad program of work within the EU-funded European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT). In recognition for this work, Smith was awarded the 2008 Ebbe Nielsen prize. Other projects PI on EU funded research on the coevolution of Galapagos ectoparasites and sociological research with Christine Hine. Smith is a consultant to numerous projects including a joint study on scholarly uses of Web2.0; the NERC funded review of UK taxonomy & systematics; the Encyclopedia of Life project; the NSF funded Tree-of-Life project; and a member of the life sciences group for Research Information Networks.</p>