The first Phenoscape Data Jamboree (we are scheduled to have one each year) is starting today at NESCent. The event brings three fish morphologists external to the project (Miles Coburn, Kevin Conway, Mário de Pinna) together with our morphologist, ontology, and informatics personnel. In addition, Nicole Washington (NCBO) and Martin Ringwald (Jackson Laboratory), two experts from communities that have made considerable strides in bringing ontology-driven and semantically explicit approaches to bear on annotating gene function and mouse phenotypes and gene expression, respectively, are here to serve in an advisory role.
We have three overall goals with the Data Jamboree. The first is to train fish morphologists outside of our project to understand how to use the tools (primarily Phenote) and ontologies to generate phenotype annotations compliant with the EQ approach.
The second is to develop, review and where necessary refine best practices guidelines for annotation, to ensure that different morphologist generate the same, or at least semantically equivalent phenotype assertions from the same character descriptions.
The third goal is to generate actual data. Hence, after an initial training exercise, over the next two and a half days the morphologists and our curators will be going over a pre-selected set of publications and translate the character descriptions into EQ-compliant assertions, and the informaticists among us as well as our advisors will look over their shoulders to see what needs refinement.
Phenoscape 
[…] support annotation of evolutionary data. However curation of data from real publications at our first Data Jamboree, in April 2008, revealed that our initial workflow was cumbersome and error […]