The VOCAB charter was approved on 2015-05-11, establishing it as a Task Group under the Process Interest Group of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). The charter can be viewed here.
These documents are mutable and represent the most recent commits.
Human-readable TDWG Standards Documentation Specification submission
Human-readable TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification submission
TDWG Standards Documentation Specification metadata as RDF/Turtle
TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification metadata as RDF/Turtle
This release contains the versions of the Standards Documentation Specification and Vocabulary Maintenance Specifications as submitted to the Review manager at the time of the request for initiation of public review.
The following materials are related to the expert review conducted from September through November 2016. The Review Manager summary was considered by the Executive Committee and released to the Task Group in December 2016. The response of the Task Group to reviews and list of changes made to create the draft submitted for public comment are linked.
Review Manager summary of the expert reviews (pdf) (Microsoft Word format)
Copy of Standards Documentation Specification with inserted review comments (Word format)
Copy of Vocabulary Maintenance Specification with inserted review comments (Word format)
Response to reviewers from Task Group
List of major changes made by Task Group
This release contains the versions of the Standards Documentation Specification and Vocabulary Maintenance Specifications as submitted to the TDWG Executive Committee upon request for the appointment of a review manager. The request was approved and Dag Endresen was appointed review manager. These versions were the ones reviewed by the expert reviewers solicited by the review manager.
To participate in the task group, go to the Issues Tracker and click on "Watch". You may need to sign up for a GitHub account and log in before "watching".
To initiate discussion on an issue, open a new issue in the tracker. Opening or commenting on an existing issue will generate emails to others who are watching the tracker.
2015-07-15 Google Hangout (attended by core members)
Here are some key documents that form crucial background for our discussions:
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Report of the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group (2013-09-20). Permanent URL: http://www.gbif.org/resource/80862. This document contains a summary of the Darwin Core (DwC) Namespace Policy in section 2.5, discusses how the Policy has worked in practice in section 2.5.3, and lists disadvantages of the Policy as it is currently implemented in section 2.5.4. It provides recommendations regarding adoption of the DwC Namespace Policy as a general practice in section 2.6.2.
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Biodiversity Knowledge Organization System: Proposed Architecture (Version 0.3, 2012-03-01). URL: http://community.gbif.org/pg/file/read/21582/biodiversity-knowledge-organization-system-proposed-architecture-version-03-march-2012. This is a draft discussion document that describes how vocabularies would be managed using a term browser and resources repository.
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Term Change Policy section of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy. Permanent URL: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/. Section 3 of the DwC Namespace Policy outlines the Term Change Policy that governs the way that changes are made to terms in the DwC vocabulary. It does not discuss how changes should be made to other (non-normative) parts of the standard, such as descriptive guides.
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Draft TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (2007-11-05). Permanent URL: http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/. This draft standard has never been ratified. Nevertheless, it has provided guidance for the documentation of TDWG Standards in lieu of other guidelines. A key deficiency of this document is that it discusses only human-readable documents and does not specify how machine-readable documents should be documented. The document defines in Section 3 a hierarchy of document types (Type 1, Type 2, Type 3) for the purpose of indicating what is normative and what is part of a standard. These designations have been widely misunderstood. There is also lack of clarity about the meaning of Section 8, which declares that standards cannot be changed in any substantive way.
Notes on terminology related to vocabularies
Vocabularies and models for documenting RDF vocabularies
Summary of processes used by other standards organizations
Notes on ISO 25964-1 and -2 (on Thesauri and interoperability)
Use cases and implementation reports in standards and vocabulary development
Draft hierarchy model of 2017-01-23
Notes on a preliminary hierarchy model including definitions and use cases
Notes on preliminary version model including definitions and use cases
Use cases for linking metadata according to version and hierarchy models
Vocabulary Maintenance Specification task group. 2017. Vocabulary Maintenance Specification (VOCAB), Version 2017-01-23. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147