Please note that the NatureServe species occurrence data is typically at a coarser scale than observation or collection data:

A Species Occurrence (SO) is an area of land and/or water in which a species is, or was, present. A SO should have practical conservation value for the species as evidenced by potential continued (or historical) presence and/or regular recurrence at a given location. For species Elements, the SO often corresponds with the local population, but when appropriate may be a portion of a population (e.g., long distance dispersers) or a group of nearby populations (e.g., metapopulation). A SO record has both spatial and tabular components including a mappable feature and its supporting database attributes.

Thank you for your time. Instructions for providing comments can be found at the bottom of this email.

Lynn

Lynn Kutner NatureServe Email: lynn_kutner@natureserve.org Phone: (303) 541-0360 www.natureserve.org

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From: Douglas Sellers Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 11:39 AM Cc: Bruce Stein; Lori Scott; Leslie Honey Subject: Public working draft of NatureServe Species Occurrence Schema, comments invited

NatureServe is pleased to announce the release of a public working draft (version 0.3) of an XML schema to describe species occurrence-level data as reflected in NatureServe's biodiversity data model. We are seeking public review and comments on this version until March 3, 2006. Comments received during the review period will be addressed in the next release, version 1.0.

NatureServe is evolving its data delivery strategy to use XML-based, Web services protocols. Last month the NatureServe Species Schema, describing species profile-type information managed by NatureServe, and familiar to many through our NatureServe Explorer website (www.natureserve.org/explorer), was released for public review. The Species Occurrence Schema that is the subject of this announcement is complementary to that schema, and focuses on describing spatially explicit species locality data as managed by the NatureServe network. The data represented by this schema provides a new level of spatial precision not currently available on NatureServe Explorer.

Our Web services strategy for sharing data among NatureServe network members and with the broader community is dependent upon the usability of these XML schemas. For this reason, we are seeking as wide a review as possible among our colleagues within the biodiversity informatics community, and especially from those organizations that regularly rely on and interact with NatureServe data.

Reviewers are invited to submit comments on either the content or the structure of the XML documents. Content reviewers will want to follow the link for the human-readable documentation. We have also provided a sample document for review, which contains example data in XML format for one species occurrence record of Ardea herodias (Great Blue Heron).

Reviewers should also note that this schema incorporates mapped occurrence location information, represented as polygon shapes. In compliance with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards for web map and web feature services, the spatial elements of the species occurrence schema are represented using Geography Markup Language (GML). In addition to the human readable documentation, technical reviewers will find useful the links to the XSD documents. Technical reviewer comments may cover the names of the XML tags, the nesting of the XML document, the structure of the XML schema, and the organization of the GML components. Technical reviewer comments from organizations that may develop applications to consume NatureServe data as expressed by these XML schema are highly encouraged.

The NatureServe Species Occurrence Schema documentation can be found at: http://services.natureserve.org/technical/speciesOccurrenceSchema.htm

Please submit comments using the feedback forms found at the same location, or via email to:

services@natureserve.org

The complementary NatureServe Species Schema documentation can be found at:

http://services.natureserve.org/technical/speciesSchema.htm

Reviewers may find it useful to compare the two documents. While the public comment period for the species schema has closed, we will consider new comments as time permits within the schedule for releasing the next version.