Greeting to everyone in Nairobi and to TDWGers everywhere,
Members of the RDF task group [1] are already aware that Steve Baskauf stepped down as co-convenor earlier this year. It would be hard to overstate the extent and significance of Steve's efforts as co-convenor, culminating in the ratification of the Darwin Core RDF Guide [2] this past March. Steve is continuing his efforts towards clarity in biodiversity informatics as head of the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification task group [3].
With the release and ratification of the guide, together with the earlier work on term documentation [4, 5] we face the question "What next?". Options include i) disbanding; ii) reconvening as an Interest Group [6] with the broad mandate of keeping abreast of developments in RDF technology and best practises, and discussing how those developments could/should affect TDWG practises; and iii) continuing as a task group with a fresh, narrow mandate from the TAG. I invite perspectives and opinions on this, both from current task group members, and also from TDWG as a whole.
To those in Kenya, I wish you all a wonderful meeting!
Cheers, Joel.
1. https://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/ 2. http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/guides/rdf/index.htm 3. https://github.com/tdwg/vocab/blob/master/README.md 4. overview of rationale: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2014-July/003274.html 5. summary of decision: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/2014-November/003381.html 6. Recall that, in TDWG, Interest Groups foster discussion, seek to develop consensus around approaches to information sharing, and maintain and update products as required; Task Groups are created by Interest Groups to create specific products (such as best practices documents or vocabulary standards).