Hi Steve, Matt, et al

On 2017-03-14 7:00 AM, tdwg-content-request@lists.tdwg.org wrote:

We are now midway through the 30 day public comment period on the SDS and so far, that issue has not come up. I was recently listening to the recording of John Wieczorek's nice Darwin Core Hour presentation on controlled vocabularies and it was apparent to me that the creation of controlled vocabularies is an issue of interest to many in the community. So I've written a blog post (http://baskauf.blogspot.com/2017/03/controlled-values-again.html) that attempts to explain in non-technical terms how the SDS specifies that controlled vocabularies should be expressed in machine-readable form. For those who are interested in the gory details, I've also included at the end a more detailed explanation of the rationale for specifying that controlled vocabularies should, in most cases, be described as SKOS concept schemes rather than ontologies.

For those of you interested in the on-going controlled vocabularies discussion, please do come to the next iDigBio Darwin Core Hour, brought to you by the iDigBio Data Mgmt Interest Group. You'll discover a bit more about what's found in some of these 23 fields where dwc suggests use of a cv. Paula Zermoglio presents: Darwin Core Hour: Thousands of shades for “Controlled” Vocabularies https://www.idigbio.org/content/darwin-core-hour-thousands-shades-%E2%80%9Ccontrolled%E2%80%9D-vocabularies. Having TDWG members present at dwc hours is invaluable - as the broader community in the webinar strives to understand what the related data quality issues are, and what they can do about them at from their vantage point.

If you care about the creation of controlled vocabularies, you should take a look at this post and create an official comment if there are things you don't like about the approach taken in the proposed specification. Our review manager, Dag Endresen, has requested that issues be raised on the issue tracker athttps://github.com/tdwg/vocab/issues . However, historically back-and-forth discussion about proposed standards has also taken place on this list, so I think that responding here for clarification and discussion would be appropriate prior to submitting an official comment.

I'd also like to suggest if you think of a topic for another dwc hour / and you've someone in mind to present (yourself maybe?), please send us your ideas - using the Darwin Core Hour Input Form: https://tinyurl.com/zja2muz

Best, Deb, et al in the iDigBio Data Mgmt Interest Group