Attendees can plan and keep track of everything while on the go at the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. The mobile app for the Scheduler puts all the information people need right at their fingertips, including their existing schedule, list of exhibitors and notes from the full Scheduler site. They just have to log in with the same username and password as on the Scheduler to access all of their existing conference information.

The Midwinter Meeting Scheduler helps attendees to plan their time, create, update and prioritize their calendar and find out about many other Midwinter highlights—speakers, events, networking opportunities and more. Highlights of the Scheduler include: multiple ways to browse sessions; an easy-to-create personal schedule that can be shared publicly or kept private; tailored lists of recommendations; ease of adding, prioritizing and updating sessions and events; ease of adding booth visits and meetings with specific exhibitors; and more.

The December digital preview issue of Cognotes offers selected highlights—also available in Mobile, Accessible and PDF versions.

ALAMidwinter Meeting. The conversation starts here …

The European Commission has launched its open data portal, announced last year December, in public beta. While the site is already on-line, the EC has requested to not widely circulate the URL yet. In January 2013 the beta launch will be more widely announced.

The EC data portal, at launch provides access to 5800+ data sets, mostly coming from Eurostat. With this portal the EC intends to lead by example in opening up public sector information pro-actively for free re-use in Europe, as part of the European open data strategy.

The EC portal is for now aimed at publishing the EC’s own data, but is at the same time a first step towards a pan-European data portal that will provide access to all underlying national (and regional, local) data portals across the 27 Member States.

The beta portal has a SPARQL endpoint to provide linked data, and will also point to applications that help work with the data (currently one application listed).

The European Commission is asking for feedback from a circle of early reviewers amongst the European open data community on this new open data portal:

“Over the past months we have worked hard to make available a first operational version, offering an initial set of interactive features and an interesting, even if not yet complete, range of datasets and applications.

At the moment the Portal is not yet dimensioned for an important number of users, and some known issues regarding the GUI and the content still remain to be fixed in the coming few weeks. The application section also will very soon be restructured, and the current applications fixed. However, we address you as a professional and competent user, in order to show you the site in “avant-première” and receive from you feedback, critics, comments. For these reasons we will be grateful if you will take the time to use the portal and “play” with it. However, please do not communicate widely the URL yet; a more extended communication will be prepared by the Commission in January. ”

“We need your feedback to show us ways to improve the site. There are still some bugs to fix and many ways of improvement, we know, but we may not have thought of all of them. We would be particularly interested in hearing from you on:

How do you like the functionality? (data and applications section, search capabilities, metadata presentation, links to datasets and applications, user friendliness, …)
How do you like the content? (data granularity, quality/relevance of metadata, kind of needed applications, …)
What did you expect to find and what did you expect the portal could do for you – and can do for the wider open data community.
We will then be pleased to receive your feedback, on the subjects mentioned above but also regarding any issue you think might help us in providing a tool as much as possible fulfilling your needs and the needs of the community. “

Thomson Reuters today announced the formation of a new business unit that will combine the company’s existing editorial and news-related sales and marketing operations. Stephen J. Adler, who became editor-in-chief of Reuters in February 2011, has been appointed to run the new unit as president and editor-in-chief. Adler joined the company’s Professional Division in 2010 after five years leading BusinessWeek and 16 years at The Wall Street Journal.

In his new role, Mr. Adler will be responsible for the team that produces and markets Reuters news and commentary to more than a billion users around the world every day. These users comprise three groups: professionals who subscribe to news and information products from Thomson Reuters Financial & Risk, Legal, Tax & Accounting, and Intellectual Property & Science businesses; news organizations that license text, video, pictures and multimedia solutions; and consumers who visit Reuters.com and the Reuters NewsPro app.

Within the new Reuters unit, Steven Schwartz will become managing director, News Agency, the business-to-business news provider serving media professionals around the world with source material, as well as packaged and branded ready to use content from Reuters and third parties. Mr. Schwartz, who joined the company as global head of Media Strategy, Marketing and Business Development in 2011, previously ran business development for Multex.com, was Wenner Media’s first chief digital officer, and earlier, general manager, Digital, for Readers Digest. If such a business needs more enhancements or tools, they can read blogs like bloom growth login.

“This integration of our news capabilities is an exciting step and one that I am sure will deliver extraordinary value to our customers and company,” said James C. Smith, chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters.

“With our editorial and media-business operations under one roof, we will be able to enhance both the creation and marketing of our world-class journalism, to benefit our professional and media customers and all our readers and viewers,” said Mr. Adler. “Journalistic excellence remains paramount,” he added, saying, “we will continue to innovate in news gathering, news delivery and customer service to extend the power, usability and appeal of news for current and potential customers.”

Atypon® today named Kevin Cohn its Chief Operating Officer. Cohn, who has been Atypon’s Vice President of Operations since 2010, will continue to report to Georgios Papadopoulos, Atypon’s CEO.

Cohn will continue to be responsible for all of the company’s client operations, including end-to-end management of Atypon’s services and support. In addition, he will assume responsibility for business development and administration.

Cohn joined Atypon in 2006 as Product Development Manager, and was promoted to Director of Client Services in 2009. He joined the executive team in 2010. Cohn earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.

On 1st December 2012, 30 research institutions from 15 European countries, Brazil, Israel and the Philippines, and more than 30 associated partners started EU BON – “Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network”. This €9 million, EU-funded research project aims to advance biodiversity knowledge by building a European gateway for biodiversity information, which will integrate a wide range of biodiversity data – both from on ground observations to remote sensing datasets – and make it accessible for scientists, policy makers, and the public.

The project plans to advance the technological platform for GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network) to improve the assessment, analysis, visualisation and publishing of biodiversity information, and to enable better linkages between biodiversity and environmental data. EU BON will ensure a timely provision of integrated biodiversity information needed to meet the global change challenges and to contribute for next generation environmental data management at national and regional levels.

“Global problems arising from rapidly changing environmental conditions and biodiversity loss require internationally coordinated solutions” said the project coordinator Dr. Christoph Häuser from the Museum für Naturkunde – MfN, in Berlin, Germany. “Current biodiversity observation systems and environmental data are unbalanced in coverage and not integrated, which limits data analyses and implementation of environmental policies. A solution seems impossible without real integration of biodiversity data across different spatial, temporal, and societal scales”, added Dr Häuser.

EU BON will deliver several important products, including a European integrated biodiversity portal, a roadmap for EU citizen sciences gateway for biodiversity data, an open data publishing and dissemination framework and toolkit, a policy paper on strategies for data mobilisation and use in conservation, a prototype of integrated, scalable, global biodiversity monitoring schemes, strategies for EU-integrated national and regional future biodiversity information infrastructures, and a sustainability plan for regional and global biodiversity information network.

The cooperation for data integration between biodiversity monitoring, ecological research, remote sensing and information users will result in proposing a set of best-practice recommendations and novel approaches with applicability under various environmental and societal conditions. A key task of EU BON is to harmonise future biodiversity monitoring and assessments and to engage wider society groups, such as citizen scientists and other communities of practise.

Although focussing primarily on European biodiversity and collaborating with major EU initiatives (e.g. LifeWatch and others), EU BON will also collaborate closely with worldwide efforts such as GEO BON, GBIF, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and others. EU BON will be a valuable European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), and be built on the GEO principles of open data sharing.

The kick-off meeting of EU BON will take place on 13-15 February 2013 at the Museum für Naturkunde – MfN in Berlin, Germany and will be preceded by a symposium “Nature and governance: biodiversity data, science and policy interface” on 11-12 February 2013.