Dear all,
During the process of reviewing the recent set of changes to the Darwin Core standard in early November 2014, it was proposed to make the definitions and comments for terms more consistent in their treatment of content recommendations. The specific proposal is logged in the Darwin Core issue tracker as https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/26.
The gist of the proposal is that recommendations on how to populate a term are often in the definition whereas we would like them to be consistently in the comments section. The list of affected terms is given below for reference.
This message is to elicit responses from any who might have a reason to recommend against these changes, which are not semantic in nature. We will leave this proposal open for commentary until 19 February 2015 unless further discussion arises resulting in amendments.
Cheers,
John
The following terms have recommendations in the definitions, which we would like to move to comments:
datasetID occurrenceID sex lifeStage reproductiveCondition behavior establishmentMeans occurrenceStatus organismID organismScope materialSampleID eventID eventDate eventTime locationID higherGeographyID continent waterBody islandGroup island country countryCode municipality locality minimumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters maximumDistanceAboveSurfaceInMeters locationAccordingTo decimalLatitude decimalLongitude geodeticDatum coordinateUncertaintyInMeters pointRadiusSpatialFit verbatimCoordinates verbatimLatitude verbatimLongitude verbatimCoordinateSystem verbatimSRS footprintWKT footprintSRS footprintSpatialFit georeferencedDate georeferenceVerificationStatus geologicalContextID identificationID dateIdentified identificationVerificationStatus taxonID scientificName subgenus taxonRank nomenclaturalCode taxonomicStatus measurementID measurementType measurementUnit measurementDeterminedDate relationshipOfResource relationshipEstablishedDate
while the following terms already have the recommendations in the comments:
institutionID collectionID basisOfRecord dynamicProperties recordedBy preparations disposition associatedMedia associatedReferences associatedSequences associatedTaxa otherCatalogNumbers associatedOccurrences associatedOrganisms previousIdentifications higherGeography georeferencedBy georeferenceSources typeStatus identifiedBy identificationReferences higherClassification measurementDeterminedBy