Teleconference 17–18 September 2018

Participants

am: Stan Blum, Greg Whitbread, Nico Franz, Steve Baskauf, Niels Klazenga

pm: Rich Pyle, Markus Doering, Greg Whitbread, Niels Klazenga

Core members:

• Aaron Wilton
• Stan Blum
• Greg Whitbread
• Nico Franz
• Steve Baskauf
• Richard Pyle
• Markus Döring

Goals

From Niel’s email to TDWG lists Sep 5, 2018 (originally from ‘Names for Biodiversity’ workshop discussion document)

• Create a modern replacement for 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.

• Review Taxon part of TDWG Ontology

  • Why hasn’t it been used?
  • What is missing? (From Greg’s comment: why wasn’t TCS used more broadly?)

• Reconcile TCS terms with TDWG ontology and Darwin Core

  • http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/Taxon

• Provide clarity on definitions in TCS (see also this - Kennedy et al. 2006)

  • Identify users: taxonomic community and taxonomic name managers;

• Enable collaboration and global compilation of taxonomic information

Process

• Need to set specific goals and expectations (Nico)
• Other standards bodies approach creating standards through use cases (Steve)
• Create Markdown file from TCS content, following SDS guidelines, so that people can edit it and we have a document that we can use as the basis for further discussion
• There has been a good discussion in the first GitHub issue, but a lot of different subjects were raised which need to be split off (or copied) into separate issues.
• CoL+ has build a model primarily based on TCS & DwC, but also included aspects from NOMEN, BGBM EDIT, Dyntaxa, Avibase and others. Work in progress, but documents of interest:
  • https://sp2000.github.io/colplus/api/api.html
  • https://github.com/Sp2000/colplus/blob/master/docs/NAMES.md
  • https://github.com/Sp2000/colplus/blob/master/docs/synonymy.png
• Think about what documentation is needed
  • Profiles: how to do things (use cases) following the standard.
    • @ghwhitbread mentioned:
      • Delivering of taxonomic data to GBIF or ALA (etc.)
      • Round-tripping of data within system
  • Examples from TCS guide
• We’ll use the TNC repository and leave the TCS repository for TCS (1)
• Meeting reports will be published on the repository’s Wiki
• We should submit an updated charter to the TDWG council. Niels will copy the current charter from the README.md into a new file, so that people can edit it.
• Look at what a semantic model of the domain looks like. Relationship object is problematic in RDF (Greg)
• Find ways to better structure discussions (Wiki?)
• Try to do what we said we were going to do.