Full title: "The tree of life as central unifying artefact for the integration of phylogenetic knowledge." This is a brief intro presentation for the 2011 BioHackathon in Kyoto, Japan. I describe a simple workflow built around semantic web services that add metadata to a backbone of the Tree of Life. The take home message is that such a structure can be a useful anchor to which knowledge can be attached, but that there are still issues with standards definition and adoption.

1. The Tree of Life as central unifying concept for the integration of phylogenetic knowledge Rutger Vos University of Reading

2. A simple example At the Computational Phyloinformatics course two weeks ago, we worked through an example that explains the title of my talk

3. The Tree of Life Web Service Using PhyloWS we traversed the Tree of Life and built a local, semantically annotated copy of a clade of interest

4. Adding taxonomic metadata Using the uBio PhyloWS service we enhanced our tree with further taxonomic annotations and links, and expanded some genera

5. Fetching additional tree data Using the TreeBASE PhyloWS service we fetched additional data to resolve the tree further using a “supertree” approach

6. Computing node ages The TimeTree PhyloWS service allowed us to anchor molecular (i.e. relative) node ages on absolute date estimates

7. Adding occurrence data Using the GBIF XML API, we then fetched occurrence records for the species in our tree

8. Visualizing the result

9. Conclusions The tree of life can be covered with all sorts of metadata (taxonomic, molecular, biogeographic, paleontological), viewable in different ways Standards still incompletely defined and adhered to, though