[tdwg-content] New Darwin Core Release

[John Wieczorek]

Dear all,

Congratulations to our community for advancing the Darwin Core standard!

The TDWG Executive Committee recently ratified various changes [1] to the
Darwin Core, resulting in a new release that incorporates consensus in
public commentary on proposed ideas, some of which have been under
discussions for several years. The highlights of the changes are as follow:

1) A new class Organism [2] has been added, with associated terms and with
a rearrangement of some terms from the Occurrence class. This change also
resulted in the depracation of the individualID term in favor of the new
organismID term.

2) The terms in the Darwin Core type vocabulary have been removed in favor
of equivalent terms in the normal Darwin Core namespace. For those of you
who care about namespaces, this is much cleaner than what we had before.
For those of you who don't care about namespaces, you still benefit from
cleaned up definitions of the Darwin Core classes, as well as not having to
look on an obscure page to find out what a MachineObservation [3] is, for
example.

3) Best practice recommendations have been added for how to populate the
content of Darwin Core terms that support lists, such as
higherClassification [4] and higherGeography [5]. The format of the content
of the dynamicProperties [6] term is now recommended to be JSON on a single
line.

4) The Dublin Core term "license" [7] is now recommended for use in Darwin
Core in place of the "rights" term. In cases where a legal document
proferring rights, such as the CC0 Public Domain Dedication [8],  can be
cited, license is the term in which that information should be captured,
while the agent granting those rights would go in the rightsHolder term and
any non-legally binding documentation about the expected behavior with
respect to the information (community norms, for example - see those for
Canadensys [9] and VertNet [10]) would go in the accessRights term.

All of the documentation within the standard has been updated. Maintainers
of tools and further documentation (including translations) should be aware
of these changes and make updates accordingly.

In an effort to facilitate more open maintenance of Darwin Core, the
standard will be maintained on Github [11], while related documentation for
the the terms and their translations will be maintained on the GBIF
Semantic Media/Wiki [12], and further documentation will be moved from the
Google Code development site [13] to a Darwin Core documentation repository
in Github [14].

Issues related to the Darwin Core standard, including requests for
clarification, changes, or additions, should be entered in the Github issue
tracker for the Darwin Core Standard [15].

If you have any doubt about where to find Darwin Core documentation or
tools, refer to the References section [16] of the Darwin Core Introduction.

Now that the new release has been published, the Darwin Core Task Group,
charged with the maintenance of the standard, will turn toward the
following activities:

1) Complete the move to Github.

2) Generate more documentation with numerous examples of how to construct
Simple Darwin Core for various types of data records.

3) Facilitate updates to profiles and software affected by these changes
such as the Occurrence Core extension [17], the Darwin Core Archive
Reader[18], and the Darwin Core API[19] )

4) Facilitate the updates to the Darwin Core RDF Guide and integrate it
into the body of the standard.

5) Facilitate the processing of new and outstanding proposals for changes
to the Darwin Core. Broad topics currently include additions or changes for
terms related to the classes Taxon (ranks and a ScientifName class), Event
(sampling), MaterialSample (preparations and sequences), and Occurrence
(environment).

6) Work with the Executive Committee to define the TDWG Standards
maintenance process.

7) Update the archived release on the TDWG site as soon as the site
reorganization is done.

I hope this all comes as good news and that the efforts to accommodate the
changes are painless, swift, and worthwhile.

Cheers,

John

[1] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/history/decisions/#Decision-2014-10-26_14
[2] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#organismindex
[3] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#machineobservationindex
[4] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#higherClassification
[5] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#higherGeography
[6] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#dynamicProperties
[7] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#dcterms:license
[8] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
[9] http://www.canadensys.net/about/norms
[10] http://www.vertnet.org/resources/norms.html
[11] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc
[12] http://kos.gbif.org/wiki/DarwinCore
[13] https://code.google.com/p/darwincore/
[14] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-documentation
[15] https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues
[16] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/index.htm#references
[17]
http://tools.gbif.org/dwca-validator/extension.do?id=http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Occurrence
[18] https://github.com/gbif/dwca-reader
[19] https://github.com/gbif/dwc-api
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.tdwg.org/pipermail/tdwg-content/attachments/20141110/7a3982fd/attachment.html