kickoff_meeting
Meeting Summary
This was the first meeting of the seven iPToL PIs and key iPlant faculty and staff, held at NESCent, May 7-8 2009. This began the iPlant tree of life engagement process. Its purpose was threefold:
1) to define the collaborative relationship between iPlant and the iPToL PIs,
2) to develop a management plan, and
3) to create a roadmap for work to be carried out over the next two years.
Working Groups:
Collaborative implementation was organized into working groups with focused development goals. Each group has an iPToL superuser or faculty member designated as the lead and point of contact. The four main working groups are: Big Trees (Alexis Stamatakis), Data Assembly (Doug Soltis, Pam Soltis, Michael Donoghue), Tree Reconciliation (Todd Vision), and Trait Evolution (Brain O'Meara). Two crosscutting working groups to develop shared data and compute infrastructure are Data Integration (Val Tannen) and Visualization (Michael Sanderson).
Management Plan and Workshops:
A steering committee composed of Michael Sanderson, Michael Donoghue, Pam Soltis, Dan Stanzione, Steve Goff, Sheldon McKay and Karla Gendler will meet monthly for overall project coordination. Working groups will self-organize and meet as required. Proposed iPToL workshops are 1) Data Assembly, fall, 2009 and 2) iPToL coordination and European outreach in Munich in 2010.
Year one priorities: Two well-defined use cases for the Tree Reconciliation and Ancestral Character State working groups were outlined. These use cases will be further developed and implemented. Also, with guidance from Dan Stanzione, available HPC resources and compute cycles will be deployed to accelerate the scale-up of Alexis Stamatakis' 50K taxa tree construction, with a view to realizing an eventual additional 10X scale-up. The actual implementation of the four main working groups will be somewhat staggered but organization of all working groups will commence as soon as may be.