VOCAB - Vocabulary Maintenance Specification Task Group

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.

The Task Group completed its work on 2017-04-25 upon the ratification of its two deliverables: the Standards Documentation Standard and the Vocabulary Maintenance Standard.

In order to cite the standards, do not link to this page. Rather, use the permanent standard IRIs listed on the landing pages accessible from the links above.

Historical documents

The final standards documents were not substantively changed from the submission for adoption, although metadata-related text in the documents was edited after adoption.

Specifications for Submission for Adoption by the Executive Committee 2017-04-10

This release contains the versions of the Standards Documentation Specification and Vocabulary Maintenance Specifications as submitted for adoption by the Executive Committee. They are unchanged from the submission for public comment except for the correction of some typographical errors in the Documentation Specification.

Draft Specifications for submission for public comment 2017-01-23

This release contains the versions of the Standards Documentation Specification and Vocabulary Maintenance Specifications as submitted to the Review manager at the time of the request for initiation of public review.

Expert reviews

The following materials are related to the expert review conducted from September through November 2016. The Review Manager summary was considered by the Executive Committee and released to the Task Group in December 2016. The response of the Task Group to reviews and list of changes made to create the draft submitted for public comment are linked.

Review Manager summary of the expert reviews (pdf) (Microsoft Word format)

Copy of Standards Documentation Specification with inserted review comments (Word format)

Copy of Vocabulary Maintenance Specification with inserted review comments (Word format)

Response to reviewers from Task Group

List of major changes made by Task Group

Draft Specifications for submission for appointment of review manager 2016-08-02

This release contains the versions of the Standards Documentation Specification and Vocabulary Maintenance Specifications as submitted to the TDWG Executive Committee upon request for the appointment of a review manager. The request was approved and Dag Endresen was appointed review manager. These versions were the ones reviewed by the expert reviewers solicited by the review manager.

Issues of the Task Group

Issues of the task group were documented by the Issues Tracker.

Meeting notes

2015-07-15 Google Hangout (attended by core members)

2016-05-04 Google Hangout

2016-07-25 Google Hangout

Background

Here are some key documents that formed crucial background the discussions:

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.
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.
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.
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.