These are notes from the Austin workshop's afternoon session on metadata

See also following developer pages:
Metadata use cases
Metadata elements

Meeting notes

Types of metadata

• Manually add an image to a node (from flickr, eol, etc)
• Taxonomy
• Character states
• Focus on static data (rather than implementing algorithms for ancestral states)
• Dynamic linking - i.e. use label to search or an image; add limits to prevent too many at once
• Show character states as well as missing data
• Indicate presence / absence of metadata in browsing mode
• Ability to customize how we display metadata, i.e. metadata selection tool
• Edge coloring is a very high priority for the trait evolution group. One possibility is allowing a gradient on an edge, too -- i.e., if a branch starts in state 0 and ends in state 1, gradient between the 0 and 1 colors rather than just painting it with state 1's color. Some other program could provide the information on colors at each node/edge (discrete states, continuous states, bootstrap support, path between two selected taxa, etc.) but the tree viewer must be able to consume and display this.
• Show monophyletic or not, and uncertain position (Examples)

Ways to display metadata

• Node icons - shape, size, colour
• Branch colours and widths
• Greyscale options for printing & presentation
• Text labels
• Encourage users to add semantic metadata so that a saved file contains appropriate links to ontologies, etc

For later:

Use of treemaps for metadata

Automated images for whole tree - this might be a separate service given a tree and an image source

Linking phylogeny to geography / Google Earth

Online data sources:
Biodiversity Heritage Library
EOL
Flickr
Morphbank

Should we focus on EOL as the major data provider?