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