Obviously, we here in Washington are greatly behind where we wanted to be, but much progress was made during the past 12 months. So what is new?

BDWD
As announced in June, we did complete our first milestone, that of data capture from major secondary sources (regional Diptera catalog or in a few cases specialized family level catalogs). And in August we surpassed the 150,000 valid species mark in the BDWD. Our data entry focus is now on references. Also, version 7.0 was compiled and is now available online. Irina has made great progress in cleaning some of our tools, the collections and people databases. These will also be put online soon.

BDWD statistics
Version 7 was put online at the end of the year. This version includes 255,565 name records representing 146,089 extant species. Also, there are 19,721 references online. Our growth rates are tapering off as we essentially have completed phase I, data capture from secondary sources. There was only 1 % increase in genus-group names and 4 % increase in species-group names. The large increase was in the reference file, which increased by 66 %. See under status at the BDWD site for the up-to-date break out of species and genera (extant only) by families.

MYIA
Irina has been working hard to master Adobe FrameMaker, which is the software product we will be using to make future MYIA volumes. Progress is good and we now feel we should be able to get two to three MYIA volumes out next year.

The first will be a mixed volume with various contributions illustrating the range of work that the BDWD program will support and publish. That includes a couple of monograph catalogs (Carnidae, Dryomyzidae, Odiniidae, Mormotomyidae), a few catalogs (Xylomyiidae, Xylophagidae), a regional treatment (Neotropical Conopidae), a checklist (Nearctic Ceratopogonidae), a couple of author treatments, one comprehensive (Kowarz) and the other brief (Hendel), and perhaps even an article on serial dating by Neal.

Then we have commitments to do world catalogs for mosquitoes, therevids, acrocerids and drosophilids during the near future. And maybe even Nearctic flower flies.

Digital editions (Tools)
In another areas, we have received funding from SI Seidell Fund to do a digital edition of Sherborn’s Index Animalium. This will be very similar to the just completed digital edition of Neave’s Nomenclator Zoologicus. The digital Sherborn should be complete in about a year, if not sooner.

We are also thinking about and, hence, would appreciate your comments on doing some digital editions of critical catalogs. For a small investment, we could produce digital editions of Kertesz’s catalog as well as the original Palaearctic catalog (Becker et alia). We are thinking only of doing a simple pdf version, not wasting money on also making a database. DO YOU FEEL THE AVAILABILITY of these classical catalogs on the WWW would be useful? The costs would be a few thousand.

Funding
We were successful and have received funding again this year from the Schlinger Foundation. Funding is available to continue Irina’s fellowship another year (until 1 November 2005). And we have resources to produce 4 MYIA and other things.

Web Interface
As you all know Irina did complete a new re-make of the Diptera Web site earlier this year.
And we coordinated this with the Diptera Tree of Life site AND we were rewarded a couple of weeks ago with a major splash in SCIENCE magazine

However, we still need to get all our tools online as well as our species interface. And then we will have to migrate our whole system to version 7 of FileMakerPro. We are currently using version 6. Because of the great challenges involved and our need to focus on the science of the BDWD, we will probably hire consultants to do this conversion for us. The consolidation of our FMP system in version 7 and the availability of better and more comprehensive XML tools will greatly streamline our process of disseminating information online (WWW) or in print format (MYIA).

Challenges for 2005
We only have web pages or links to them for about 10 % of the currently recognized fly families (16 out of 188). We should be able to produce a minimal page for each family of Diptera by the end of next year.

Generic and species pages are even fewer, but we should try to generate more of them. Most of our colleagues still think in terms of papers like my old professor wrote, “New and little-known crane flies ...” and how many and how fast they can publish new species. Unfortunately, that is the past and the future is building a new digital Systema Naturae with taxon web pages. As an encouragement to workers to do so, we will start a system like ZooTaxa where we will publish paper versions so that new taxonomic information can be validated when prepared as taxon web pages (that is, we will freely distribute to a core set of libraries paper archive copies of the new taxon web pages we post at the Diptera Web site). We are now working on the new standards for these pages, but Irina’s milichiid site is a good example.

The other challenges are outlined above: 1) getting 4 volumes of MYIA published; 2) getting the data from Sherborn integrated into BDWD; 3) completing the references from secondary sources and linking them to the appropriate name records; 4) getting the species interface and tools online; and 5) as outlined in our data plan a revised Nearctic names data set for ITIS.

Irina Brake & Chris Thompson
4 January 2005