Dear all, Here is a short update on developments that are taking place with NCD.

Wouter Addink and Ruud Altenburg at ETI are developing the NCD Toolkit and are currently ensuring that it will work with two languages - English plus a local language. Along with myself and Markus Döring in Berlin we are tidying up the NCD schema into a stable version to be used as the basis for the toolkit.

The toolkit itself, along with the other developments outlined below, is expected to be ready for demonstration at this year's TDWG annual conference in mid-September.

Markus is also working on the RDF aspects and integration with the TDWG ontology. He has added the emtpy basic classes of NCD to the TDWG ontology and is working on the following:

http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Collection.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Institution.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/CollectionType.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/InstitutionType.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/ObjectType.rdf http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/PreservationMethodType.rdf

Carol Butler at the Smithsonian is starting to assemble termlists for those elements that will benefit from having controlled vocabulary and these will also be integrated into the TDWG ontology.

Connie Rinaldo at Harvard is working on the documentation set. She has reviewed the current introduction, documentation, and schema to see where changes need to be made. She has also reviewed the background TDWG material so that the new documentation will fit the TDWG standards. The implementation guide will be created in collaboration with ETI.

I have completed the mapping of the Index Herbariorum data into NCD and next will be selecting which fields will be used so that an NCD Institution record can act as a business card for corporates in the biodiversity collections domain.

The NCD 2007 Workshop will take place in June and the report from that will provide further details on progress. In the meantime, the list of deliverables for 2007 is available on the NCD wiki at:

http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/NCD/NCDListOfDeliverables

With thanks, Neil --------- Neil Thomson NCD Interest Group Convenor