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July 2014

12 participants
2 discussions

Proposed changes to Darwin Core
by joel sachs 25 Jul '14

25 Jul '14

Hi Everyone, I’d like to direct everyone’s attention to issues 204 - 226 in the Darwin Core issue tracker [1]. These issues describe proposed changes to the Darwin Core standard, and were entered back in January in follow up to the Documenting Darwin Core workshop held at TDWG 2013. These proposals reflect what the organizers of that workshop believe to be the consensus that was reached during the workshop’s four sessions in Florence. The background for this is that, for some time, a number of TDWGers have been working towards an applicability statement to provide guidance on expressing Darwin Core data using RDF. In the course of this work, it became apparent that the semantics of Darwin Core itself needed a slight re-think, in order to be usable on the semantic web. The goal was to be backward-compatible, i.e. to introduce and re-define terms in a way that does not affect the meaning of existing Darwin Core spreadsheet data, but which provides the semantic grounding necessary for meaningful RDF. I think this goal has, for the most part, been realized. If you have examples to the contrary, please share them. Steve Baskauf provides a good overview of the proposals in Issue 204. Of all of them, only Issue 205 (the introduction of a class to represent the taxonomically homogenous units that are described in Darwin Core occurrence data) was contentious, primarily because we disagreed on a good name for the class. (“We” refers to the ad-hoc group that worked on translating the notes from the workshop into concrete proposals - John Wieczorek, James Macklin, Markus Döring, Rich Pyle, Tim Robertson, Bob Morris, Hilmar Lapp, Steve Baskauf, Gregor Hagedorn, and myself.) I’ve mentioned my own concerns as a comment on that issue. There is one proposal that had the support of the group, but that is not yet entered into the Issue Tracker - the deprecation of dwc:basisOfRecord. The motivation for this proposal is that dwc:basisOfRecord is widely misunderstood and inconsistently used, coupled with the fact that GBIF currently uses basisOfRecord with the semantics of the (to be proposed) dwc:hasEvidence term. However, we have held back on proposing "hasEvidence", as there remain some unresolved issues regarding how it would be used. This will likely be left as future work, perhaps to be tackled at TDWG 2014. Many thanks to all who participated in the workshop, and to all who take the time to review its outcomes. Joel. 1. https://code.google.com/p/darwincore/issues/list ["ID" -> "Sort Down" to see in order]

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You're Invited - Data Management Interest Group - Kickoff Webinar 7 August
by Debbie Paul 20 Jul '14

20 Jul '14

Hello Everyone!, Got data in your database? Have you shared it? Is your data available via one or more other websites? Can you get enhanced, modified, standardized, georeferenced, annotated data from these sites back into your database? Re-integrating data can be challenging for many reasons. A new Data Management Interest Group at iDigBio plans to discuss issues surrounding shared data. We'd like to document the help, information, and infrastructure the community needs in order to re-integrate data. If you need help, please come to this meeting and share what issues you face. If you have ideas for how to help, please join us. *What:* Webinar to kickoff a new iDigBio Data Management Interest Group <https://www.idigbio.org/content/data-management-interest-group-kickoff-webi…> *What format*: A short presentation will be followed by open discussion for all participants. *When:* Thursday 7 August 2014, 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT *Where: *http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/datamgmt (nothing to install, use any browser) Headsets are recommended (they help remove echo). *Who: *All are welcome, please invite your colleagues, no registration needed. *Questions?* Please send to any member of the group: Data Management Interest Group <https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/IDigBio_Working_Groups#Data_Manageme…> See you soon! Deb Paul, et al *Wiki: *https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/index.php/Data_Management_Interest_Group (please excuse cross-postings) -- Upcoming iDigBio Events https://www.idigbio.org/calendar --Deborah Paul, on Twitter @idbdeb iDigBio Technology Specialist Institute for Digital Information, 234 LSB Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida 32306 850-644-6366

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