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This annual award of €30,000 recognises a researcher who is combining biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way.
Speaking about the award when he was notified, Dr. Smith said “I am truly delighted and honoured to receive this prestigious award. Cybertaxonomy is coming of age, as more and more people are engaging with an expanding set of tools supporting biodiversity research. To be given the award at this time, when there are so many developments in the field is a great privilege.”
The GBIF Science Committee noted in announcing the 2008 Prize Winner, “Dr. Smith is one of the architects of our cybertaxonomy future. Through his work he has been able to successfully and innovatively integrate his broad background in systematics and his keen interest in using the web as a tool for science communication. In addition to other important Biodiversity Informatics work, the key innovation for which Dr. Smith is being recognised is that of ‘Scratchpads’.”
Dr. Smith has lead the development of Scratchpads, a social cyber-networking tool that facilitates the networking of communities of scientists to build, share and publish digital biodiversity information in a simple and intuitive way. This work is already having significant impact not only on the way systematists conduct their work, but also on the efficient integration of these efforts into the cyber-taxonomy e-infrastructures being developed by initiatives such as GBIF and the European Distributed Institution for Taxonomy (EDIT).
According to the Chair of the GBIF Science Committee, Dr. Erick Mata, “Dr. Smith is a scientist who truly and unquestionably represents the spirit of the Ebbe Nielsen Prize through his excellent work.”
Dr. Smith will use the prize to address user needs within the Scratchpad project (http://scratchpads.eu/). Specifically, Dr. Smith intends to further develop more intuitive management tools for taxonomic names and concepts as well as biological (molecular and morphological) characters. These will also result in a better integration with ongoing development work on the Global Names Architecture (GNA; a joint project between GBIF and the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) and the Morphbank project (University of Florida).
The Prize will be awarded by the Honourable Dr. Ali Mohammed Shein, Vice President of Tanzania, on 5 November 2008 in Arusha, Tanzania. The ceremony coincides with GBIF’s annual Governing Board Meeting (GB15). At the prize giving Dr. Smith will make a presentation on his Scratchpad work. All interested parties are invited to attend the ceremony. For more information, see http://www.gbif.org/GB15.
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