Hi Pete, There are no Kings or Queens in TDWG. Well, maybe a few princesses. However, if you lock yourself in the dungeon there is very little we can do. Please, don't throw the key away in the crocodile pond around your own castle. Nobody is going to swim in there. I'll be happy to come and rescue you from yourself as I think you are truly victimizing yourself unnecessarily. Nobody has an agenda. Ideas come and go, they are revisited, rehashed, recycled over and over until maybe a seed germinates, and yes, sometimes in someone's else backyard. You can jump in and help, contribute, fertilize, make it grow better instead of whining. We heard the same stuff over and over again. It was about LOD at some point. There are no EGOs here but your own, clearly lost in self pity. TDWG loves you. Everyone loves the contribution you, all of us, can provide. It was really great to see you last year in Woods Hole. Come back!! We want you there! Nico

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Message: 1 Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:11:31 -0500 From: Peter DeVries <pete.devries@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] RDF/OWL Good Practices Task Group To: joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> Cc: tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Message-ID: <CAE0MQeEcB2_Cdcj18_0esYu96qgwW-thK8+gZm8bz-nXN9W-1g@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi TDWG'ers,

I thought it would be good to explain in a different way how I see TDWG functioning.

There are people who take pride in their intellect.

If it turns out that they are wrong they can experience a form of cognitive dissonance.

The either consciously or unconsciously convince themselves that the original person taking the "correct side" was wrong, or that they had actually heard it somewhere else (they were never on the "wrong" side)

In some cases, they are aware of what they are doing and actively try to punish or exclude the person who "corrected" them.

In the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes )

a child spoke up while others remained silent - afraid of what might happen to them if the told the King the truth.

The reason this is popular tale has been translated into 100 languages, is that this kind of behavior is so common.

The irony is that not about intellect. but emotions.

Has anyone else on this list had the experience of be punished after correctly pointing out a flaw in someone else's logic?

Is this behavior at odds with the goals and best interests of the group?

I am concerned that there is only place in TDWG for the Kings and those that allow them to keep there Ego's happy.

Respectfully,

- Pete

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:46 PM, joel sachs <jsachs@csee.umbc.edu> wrote:

...

Greetings everyone,

After some back and forth amongst Steve Baskauf, myself, Greg Whitbread, and the executive, we've decided to move forward with an RDF/OWL task group, convened under the TAG. Our task will be to deliver a document comprising i. use cases and competency questions; ii. well documented examples of addressing those use cases via rdf and sparql; and iii. discussion of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches illustrated by the examples.

Our draft charter is at http://code.google.com/p/tdwg-rdf/wiki/CharterOfTG and we welcome comments, suggestions, and better ideas. One area where we're still open is the question of whether or not our deliverable should be an official Best Current Practice document [1]. The charter reflects our current feeling that it should not. After we deliver our "book of use cases and examples", options would include being re-chartered by the TAG to produce a best practices document, spinning off as a "Semantic Web Interest Group", or disbanding (either in triumph or despair).

When we were planning to convene as an Interest Group, several of you accepted our invitation to serve as core members, and we hope that convening as a Task Group does not change your willingness to do so. If you would like to be a core member of the group, and we haven't yet contacted you, there's a good chance that we will. But don't wait! Feel free to volunteer for core membership. (And recall that you don't have to be a "core member to" contribute.)

In regards timeline, I'd like to incorporate any feedback we receive, and submit the charter to the executive at the end of this week, in hopes of being chartered by New Orleans.

Many thanks! Joel.

1. http://www.tdwg.org/standards/status-and-categories/

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-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 Email: pdevries@wisc.edu TaxonConcept <http://www.taxonconcept.org/> & GeoSpecies<http://about.geospecies.org/> Knowledge Bases A Semantic Web, Linked Open Data <http://linkeddata.org/> Project --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------