I agree wholly. There does remain the question of what changes, if any, are being urged for legacy data, and what is the scope of such changes. One thing that ought to happen is that any recommendations be versioned so that software can document and act upon the version it means to. I forget whether GBIF recommendations do this, but in another context I'd urgently like to know. :-)
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 10:50 AM, "Markus Döring (GBIF)" mdoering@gbif.org wrote:
[concensus discussion] ... Why make all software check for two alternatives when a consensus would fix the problem? (Consensus... did I say that word in a tdwg-content email????)
Ummm, because plenty of data will not meet the consensus? Because robust software checks for things that may occur even if they violate expectations, rules, standards, recommendations, conventions, or consensus?
Nevertheless its worthwhile trying to converge towards a standard vocabulary. So we definitely should recommend a best practice that more and more people can follow over time!
At GBIF we recommend the english values, but if there is a consensus to change that to latin I think we dont mind: http://rs.gbif.org/vocabulary/gbif/rank.xml
Markus