Dear all,

At the joint SPNHC–TDWG conference last week we had a ‘Names for Biodiversity’ workshop where we decided to re-activate the Taxonomic Names and Concepts Interest Group (TNC). There will be a new charter before the end of the year, but the group’s first order of business will be to work on a replacement – or new version – of the Taxonomic Names and Concepts Transfer Schema (TCS) that (i) is compliant with the TDWG Standards Documentation Standard and Vocabulary Maintenance Standard; (ii) provides for the needs of the various types of users and use cases of Taxonomic Names (and Concepts) in the biodiversity informatics space and (iii) as much as possible synthesises and takes benefit of the work that has been done in the TDWG community so far.

The work of the Interest Group will mostly take place in our GitHub repository, https://github.com/tdwg/tnc, and I invite everyone with an interest in the subject to watch this repository. A very interesting discussion has already been developing since the workshop and we, the participants of that discussion, feel that we are making good progress towards pinning down some of the core concepts. As with other TDWG Interest Groups, everybody watching the repository will be considered a member of the TNC.

In order to keep the momentum going we’ll have monthly phone meetings. As the current membership is spread all over the world, including some members pretty close to and on either side of the international date line, we’ll have two meetings at different times within a 24 hour period each time, similar to what the TDWG council does. Meetings will be announced in GitHub issues. I plan to organise the first meeting(s) next week or the week after.

Best wishes,

Niels