Unfortunately, the TDWG collaboration infrastructure does not work as it once did. It hasn't for more than 3 years. It is even more unfortunate that many of the pages critical to facilitating standards development and dissemination are the broken ones, and we haven't yet been able to figure out how to override the broken parts. Something between a significant to complete replacement is in order. At the moment, we are trying to explore our options, but progress is slow as we are all overcommitted with our day jobs. As always, TDWG is open to contributions of all kinds, from suggestions, to effort, to funding. We do have modest resources to support the re-implementation. -Stan TDWG Treasurer On 3/15/12 8:19 PM, "Bob Morris" <morris.bob@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.tdwg.org/homepage-news-item/article/lsid-and-guid-applicability -statements-approved/ lists http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/download/ as the location of the approved standards, but those documents indicate that their status is "TDWG Draft Standard" No doubt those are the drafts that were actually approved, but shouldn't the documents be corrected as to their status? Also, it would be far nicer if they were downloadable as separate documents. It is clumsy to cite just one of them.

Speaking of citation, what if all approved standards carried a recommended way to cite them?

Bob

-- Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390

IT Staff Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University

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I will add to what Bob said in the event that somebody eventually actually fixes the "Draft Standard" error. The draft TDWG Standards Documentation standard (http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/) says in section 9 that "For archival reasons all files in a standard must be in an open format for which parsers are commonly available. For this purpose an open format is defined as being one for which it would be possible to write a parser on the basis of a published specification without having to rely on code libraries for which the source code is not available or to pay a license fee. Formats that are currently considered to be acceptable include: ASCII Text XML HTML Portable Document Format (PDF) Portable Network Graphic (PNG) JPEG OASIS OpenDocument" The GIUD and LSID standards are currently packaged as Word documents, which is not an open format. They probably should be archived as PDFs. On the subject of the draft Standards Documentation standard (if anybody is taking notes on this), Bob's suggestion that there should be a recommended "Here's how to cite this" included in the documentation is a good one which should be included in the documentation standard. The "permanent URL" (e.g. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/ ) should be a part of that citation. For convenience, I have created and posted pdf versions of several of the standards or draft standards (mostly so that I could refer to them in a browser) at: http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/tdwg-stds-spec.pdf http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/guid-applicability-final-2011-01.pdf http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/LSID%20AS_2011_01_final.pdf http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/TCS-Schema-UserGuide-v1.3.pdf http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/NCD-v090_TDWG-NonNormative.pdf http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu/pages/NCD-v090_TDWG-Normative.pdf but this is not an adequate substitute for making an open-format version accessible via the permanent URL. Also, as I've whined about several times already, the TAPIR standard (http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/) download link http://www.tdwg.org/standards/449/download/ doesn't even download the right standard. Steve Bob Morris wrote:

http://www.tdwg.org/homepage-news-item/article/lsid-and-guid-applicability-s... lists http://www.tdwg.org/standards/150/download/ as the location of the approved standards, but those documents indicate that their status is "TDWG Draft Standard" No doubt those are the drafts that were actually approved, but shouldn't the documents be corrected as to their status? Also, it would be far nicer if they were downloadable as separate documents. It is clumsy to cite just one of them.

Speaking of citation, what if all approved standards carried a recommended way to cite them?

Bob

-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A. delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235 office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu