Events & Courses

Paleoinformatics: Synthesising data from the past to illuminate the future

Synthesising palaeontological occurrence data and taxonomy into useable databases and web-systems will be one of the major challenges for palaeontology over the next couple of decades. 

On the one hand compiling palaeontological data and integrating it with other databases has immense research potential in fields from palaeoceanography and climate change through to palaeobiology. On the other hand there is an ever increasing expectation that information, on virtually everything, should be available electronically via the web. In both areas palaeontology is nowhere near as advanced as we might hope and there are major challenges for the future - not least since there are particular information technology problems in handling and standardising taxonomic and stratigraphic data.

The purpose of this meeting was to bring together researchers who are playing lead roles in significant current initiatives and/or who have carried out particularly interesting individual work, with the objective of sharing experience and show-casing good practice for the large numbers of other workers who are interested to develop or improve palaeoinformatics within their own work.