At the TDWG meeting in December, I led an informative session describing the main points of the draft Standards Documentation Specification (SDS) and its sister standard, the draft Vocabulary Management Specification. At that session, some participants seem to be taken aback at the prescription by the SDS that controlled vocabularies should be SKOS concept schemes rather than ontologies. There wasn't enough time at the meeting to fully explore that issue and I hoped that it would come up for further discussion during the public comment period.
We are now midway through the 30 day public comment period on the SDS and so far, that issue has not come up. I was recently listening to the recording of John Wieczorek's nice Darwin Core Hour presentation on controlled vocabularies and it was apparent to me that the creation of controlled vocabularies is an issue of interest to many in the community. So I've written a blog post (http://baskauf.blogspot.com/2017/03/controlled-values-again.html) that attempts to explain in non-technical terms how the SDS specifies that controlled vocabularies should be expressed in machine-readable form. For those who are interested in the gory details, I've also included at the end a more detailed explanation of the rationale for specifying that controlled vocabularies should, in most cases, be described as SKOS concept schemes rather than ontologies.
If you care about the creation of controlled vocabularies, you should take a look at this post and create an official comment if there are things you don't like about the approach taken in the proposed specification. Our review manager, Dag Endresen, has requested that issues be raised on the issue tracker at https://github.com/tdwg/vocab/issues . However, historically back-and-forth discussion about proposed standards has also taken place on this list, so I think that responding here for clarification and discussion would be appropriate prior to submitting an official comment.
Steve