Dear all,
Congratulations to our community for advancing the Darwin Core standard!
The TDWG Executive Committee recently ratified various changes [1] to the Darwin Core, resulting in a new release that incorporates consensus in public commentary on proposed ideas, some of which have been under discussions for several years. The highlights of the changes are as follow:
1) A new class Organism [2] has been added, with associated terms and with a rearrangement of some terms from the Occurrence class. This change also resulted in the depracation of the individualID term in favor of the new organismID term.
2) The terms in the Darwin Core type vocabulary have been removed in favor of equivalent terms in the normal Darwin Core namespace. For those of you who care about namespaces, this is much cleaner than what we had before. For those of you who don't care about namespaces, you still benefit from cleaned up definitions of the Darwin Core classes, as well as not having to look on an obscure page to find out what a MachineObservation [3] is, for example.
3) Best practice recommendations have been added for how to populate the content of Darwin Core terms that support lists, such as higherClassification [4] and higherGeography [5]. The format of the content of the dynamicProperties [6] term is now recommended to be JSON on a single line.
4) The Dublin Core term "license" [7] is now recommended for use in Darwin Core in place of the "rights" term. In cases where a legal document proferring rights, such as the CC0 Public Domain Dedication [8], can be cited, license is the term in which that information should be captured, while the agent granting those rights would go in the rightsHolder term and any non-legally binding documentation about the expected behavior with respect to the information (community norms, for example - see those for Canadensys [9] and VertNet [10]) would go in the accessRights term.
All of the documentation within the standard has been updated. Maintainers of tools and further documentation (including translations) should be aware of these changes and make updates accordingly.
In an effort to facilitate more open maintenance of Darwin Core, the standard will be maintained on Github [11], while related documentation for the the terms and their translations will be maintained on the GBIF Semantic Media/Wiki [12], and further documentation will be moved from the Google Code development site [13] to a Darwin Core documentation repository in Github [14].
Issues related to the Darwin Core standard, including requests for clarification, changes, or additions, should be entered in the Github issue tracker for the Darwin Core Standard [15].
If you have any doubt about where to find Darwin Core documentation or tools, refer to the References section [16] of the Darwin Core Introduction.
Now that the new release has been published, the Darwin Core Task Group, charged with the maintenance of the standard, will turn toward the following activities:
1) Complete the move to Github.
2) Generate more documentation with numerous examples of how to construct Simple Darwin Core for various types of data records.
3) Facilitate updates to profiles and software affected by these changes such as the Occurrence Core extension [17], the Darwin Core Archive Reader[18], and the Darwin Core API[19] )
4) Facilitate the updates to the Darwin Core RDF Guide and integrate it into the body of the standard.
5) Facilitate the processing of new and outstanding proposals for changes to the Darwin Core. Broad topics currently include additions or changes for terms related to the classes Taxon (ranks and a ScientifName class), Event (sampling), MaterialSample (preparations and sequences), and Occurrence (environment).
6) Work with the Executive Committee to define the TDWG Standards maintenance process.
7) Update the archived release on the TDWG site as soon as the site reorganization is done.
I hope this all comes as good news and that the efforts to accommodate the changes are painless, swift, and worthwhile.
Cheers,
John
[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/decisions/#Decision-2014-10-26_14 [2] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#organismindex [3] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#machineobservationindex [4] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#higherClassification [5] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#higherGeography [6] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#dynamicProperties [7] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#dcterms:license [8] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode [9] http://www.canadensys.net/about/norms [10] http://www.vertnet.org/resources/norms.html [11] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc [12] http://kos.gbif.org/wiki/DarwinCore [13] https://code.google.com/p/darwincore/ [14] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-documentation [15] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues [16] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm#references [17] http://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/extension.do?id=http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/... [18] https://github.com/gbif/dwca-reader [19] https://github.com/gbif/dwc-api