The VOCAB charter was approved on 2015-05-11, establishing it as a Task Group under the Process Interest Group of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). The charter can be viewed here.
Human-readable TDWG Standards Documentation Specification submission
Human-readable TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification submission
TDWG Standards Documentation Specification metadata as RDF/Turtle
TDWG Vocabulary Maintenance Specification metadata as RDF/Turtle
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2015-07-15 Google Hangout (attended by core members)
Here are some key documents that form crucial background for our discussions:
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Report of the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group (2013-09-20). Permanent URL: http://www.gbif.org/resource/80862. This document contains a summary of the Darwin Core (DwC) Namespace Policy in section 2.5, discusses how the Policy has worked in practice in section 2.5.3, and lists disadvantages of the Policy as it is currently implemented in section 2.5.4. It provides recommendations regarding adoption of the DwC Namespace Policy as a general practice in section 2.6.2.
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Biodiversity Knowledge Organization System: Proposed Architecture (Version 0.3, 2012-03-01). URL: http://community.gbif.org/pg/file/read/21582/biodiversity-knowledge-organization-system-proposed-architecture-version-03-march-2012. This is a draft discussion document that describes how vocabularies would be managed using a term browser and resources repository.
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Term Change Policy section of the Darwin Core Namespace Policy. Permanent URL: http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/namespace/. Section 3 of the DwC Namespace Policy outlines the Term Change Policy that governs the way that changes are made to terms in the DwC vocabulary. It does not discuss how changes should be made to other (non-normative) parts of the standard, such as descriptive guides.
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Draft TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (2007-11-05). Permanent URL: http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147/. This draft standard has never been ratified. Nevertheless, it has provided guidance for the documentation of TDWG Standards in lieu of other guidelines. A key deficiency of this document is that it discusses only human-readable documents and does not specify how machine-readable documents should be documented. The document defines in Section 3 a hierarchy of document types (Type 1, Type 2, Type 3) for the purpose of indicating what is normative and what is part of a standard. These designations have been widely misunderstood. There is also lack of clarity about the meaning of Section 8, which declares that standards cannot be changed in any substantive way.
Notes on terminology related to vocabularies
Vocabularies and models for documenting RDF vocabularies
Summary of processes used by other standards organizations
Notes on ISO 25964-1 and -2 (on Thesauri and interoperability)
Use cases and implementation reports in standards and vocabulary development
Draft hierarchy model of 2016-07-24
Notes on a preliminary hierarchy model including definitions and use cases
Notes on preliminary version model including definitions and use cases
Use cases for linking metadata according to version and hierarchy models
Vocabulary Maintenance Specification task group. 2015. Vocabulary Maintenance Specification (VOCAB), Version 0.1. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) http://www.tdwg.org/standards/147