Agenda

• Working group member introductions
• Review of responsibilities and roles - who will do what?
• Discussion of group's overall goals/Project Charter
• Begin defining group's initial deliverables and milestones
• Tactical items - calendar, wiki, scheduling, etc.
• Open discussion

Notes

Attendees: Michael Sanderson, Karen Cranston , Sheldon McKay, Michael Gonzales, Adam Kubach, Bernice, Natalie Henriques

• The meeting began with group member introductions.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Michael Gonzales and Sheldon McKay are on the engagement team to facilitate interactions between the working groups, keep groups on track and manage milestones and deliverables.
• Sheldon McKay – Responsible for high level decisions, input, coordination and to serve as a liaison with iPlant and the iPToL working group. Oversee the order and structure in the process.
• Karen Cranston – working group lead; oversight of working group activities; liaison between iPlant and the Field Museum of Natural History TreeViz working group.
• Mike Sanderson – role is to act as an informed user and to help with use cases
• Adam and Bernice – would lead in the guidance and expertise from the things coming in from Mike and Karen

Groups Overall Goals and Project Charter

• How are we going to accomplish and execute our goals? What does success look like for us?
• Sheldon – We need to find out from Mike S and Karen what the broad vision is and draft a project charter.
• Mike S – An initial goal is a scalable tool for visualizing trees with over 100K+ nodes. There is a lack of scalable viz of trees to enable users to navigate..it’s an open niche area we should try to fill.
• Karen – A place to focus is on a viz tool for large phylogeny. Ability to load a tree with 100K tips in a way that is not overwhelming.
• What is the impediment? It is aesthetics more than computational although there are technical problems too. For the aesthetics the example uses is to have a ‘Google Earth’ for trees, that sort of experience, something that is intuitive.
• Sheldon – you can’t look at 500K species at once in a way that makes sense. Have logic and intelligence in the rendering engine that will produce something understandable.
• Bernice – Semantics of the graphics but also the semantics of what people are trying to see, for example, filtering the tree, comparing one section with another. Provide the tools to represent the data to the question they are trying to answer.
• Karen – The actual visualization of big tree is the first step, we tend to over focus on what we can do after. Visualizing a large tree is hard and has not yet been solved
• The “gee whiz” factor is an important part of it too.

Tactical Items

• Is there a place to put links and references? The wiki is our primary collaboration tool outside of the teleconference where you will find a list of meetings and discussions. It is centralized and encourages transparency with the other groups. Information content is sparse at this time, but will increase as we progress.
• Sheldon is working on an overview with a high level summary of how groups are related.
• If anyone as difficulty accessing the wiki contact Michael G and Sheldon.
• ACTION: Sheldon will move the FMNH wiki link to a more prominent position on the page.
• The meetings are currently scheduled bi-weekly.
• ACTION: Michael G will send the link to the Google calendar to the members of the group.
• Michael G will solicit agenda items for discussion from Mike S and Karen before each meeting.
• Questions on budgets, timelines and resources should be sent to Sheldon and Michael who will ultimately pass it on to the University of Arizona.
• Please continue this conversation outside of this meeting so we can have it coalesce and move forward.