[tdwg-tag] GUID and LSID standards

[Steve Baskauf]

I will add to what Bob said in the event that somebody eventually 
actually fixes the "Draft Standard" error. 

The draft TDWG Standards Documentation standard 
(http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/) says in section 9 that
"For archival reasons all files in a standard must be in an open format 
for which parsers are commonly available. For this purpose an open 
format is defined as being one for which it would be possible to write a 
parser on the basis of a published specification without having to rely 
on code libraries for which the source code is not available or to pay a 
license fee.
Formats that are currently considered to be acceptable include:
ASCII Text
XML
HTML
Portable Document Format (PDF)
Portable Network Graphic (PNG)
JPEG
OASIS OpenDocument"

The GIUD and LSID standards are currently packaged as Word documents, 
which is not an open format.  They probably should be archived as PDFs.

On the subject of the draft Standards Documentation standard (if anybody 
is taking notes on this), Bob's suggestion that there should be a 
recommended "Here's how to cite this" included in the documentation is a 
good one which should be included in the documentation standard.  The 
"permanent URL" (e.g. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/ ) should be a 
part of that citation. 

For convenience, I have created and posted pdf versions of several of 
the standards or draft standards (mostly so that I could refer to them 
in a browser) at:

http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/tdwg-stds-spec.pdf
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/guid-applicability-final-2011-01.pdf
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/LSID%20AS_2011_01_final.pdf
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/TCS-Schema-UserGuide-v1.3.pdf
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/NCD-v090_TDWG-NonNormative.pdf
http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/NCD-v090_TDWG-Normative.pdf

but this is not an adequate substitute for making an open-format version 
accessible via the permanent URL. 

Also, as I've whined about several times already, the TAPIR standard 
(http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/) download link 
http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/download/ doesn't even download the 
right standard.

Steve

Bob Morris wrote:
> http://www.tdwg.org/homepage-news-item/article/lsid-and-guid-applicability-statements-approved/
> lists http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/download/ as the location of
> the approved standards, but those documents indicate that their status
> is "TDWG Draft Standard"  No doubt those are the drafts that were
> actually approved, but shouldn't the documents be corrected as to
> their status?  Also, it would be far nicer if they were downloadable
> as separate documents. It is clumsy to cite just one of them.
>
> Speaking of citation, what if all approved standards carried a
> recommended way to cite them?
>
> Bob
>
>   

-- 
Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences

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