Dear Executive Committee,
As convenor and on behalf of the Darwin Core Maintenance Interest Group it is my pleasure to announce that the Humboldt Extension Task Group has completed and presents the results of the tasks in its charter ( https://www.tdwg.org/community/osr/humboldt-extension/). The tasks included a public review, which went through two rounds of changes and resulted in useful updates to the originally proposed vocabulary enhancement to Darwin Core. The result is a clear set of terms, their definitions, usage comments, and examples and a formal controlled vocabulary for the new term eco:taxonCompletenessReported. The entire history of the review process ( https://github.com/tdwg/hc/issues?q=is%3Aissue) and the resulting changes can be found in the TDWG Humboldt Extension GitHub repository ( https://github.com/tdwg/hc).
In addition to the review, the GitHub repository and associated documents contain the necessary documentation to comply with the Vocabulary Maintenance Standard (https://www.tdwg.org/standards/vms/). The Landing page for the Extension (https://eco.tdwg.org/) provides links to all relevent documentation, including the normative "Humboldt Extension Vocabulary List of Terms" document (https://eco.tdwg.org/list/), a "Usage Guide" (non-normative, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rX4m94rtZDR_8iIe3RvRnNYKDJcmSX3ii4S5hCzn..., which will be even further developed in collaboration with GBIF), the "Implementation Experience Report" ( https://eco.tdwg.org/humboldt_extension_implementation_experience_report.pdf... "isLeastSpecificTargetCategoryQuantityInclusive Guidelines" ( https://eco.tdwg.org/inclusive/),documentation entitled "Properties of hierarchical events in the Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories" ( https://eco.tdwg.org/hierarchy/), and the "Quick Reference Guide" ( https://eco.tdwg.org/terms/) following the pattern of human-friendly documentation for the Darwin Core standard.
Following the Vocabulary Maintenance Standard, by endorsing this proposal and forwarding it to you, we have entered into the Executive Committee Decision Phase. Once ratification is complete, the highlighted Note at the beginning of the landing page will be removed to reflect the new ratified status of the Vocabulary Enhancement.
I want to add a personal note of appreciation for the monumental effort embodied in this submission. The Task Group was extremely effective, and was under the constant capable leadership of Yanina Sica. It was a fantastic job by all involved. I look forward to seeing the immense impact it promises to have on sharing ecological biodiversity data.
Cheers,
John