Note: This charter is temporary and will be replaced by the final version when that is approved by the Executive Committee.

The Invasive Species Interest Group will develop standard computer-based mechanisms for expressing and transferring information about invasive species, including taxonomies, distributions, terminologies, descriptions, identification tools, pathways, invasiveness, management information, and associated resources, for use by the GISIN and the global invasive species science community in general.

Note: This charter is temporary and will be replaced by the final version when that is approved by the Executive Committee.

The Process subgroup will draft new bylaws[1] for TDWG, which will specify how standards are developed, documented, reviewed, revised, and approved. To the extent that the revised bylaws require changes to the organizational structure of TDWG, the Process subgroup will draft new articles of the TDWG Constitution, which will specify how the new entities are to be formed and maintained, and what their roles will be.

In addition, the Process group may draft companion documents to recommend how entities within TDWG conduct business so as to improve effectiveness and communications within and beyond TDWG.

The revised bylaws are intended to improve the speed and efficiency of standards development, as well as the quality and integration of standards.

Note: This charter is temporary and will be replaced by the final version when that is approved by the Executive Committee.

[1] Merriam-Webster dictionary defines bylaw [one word] as: a rule adopted by an organization chiefly for the government of its members and the regulation of its affairs. Other IT standards bodies do not refer to their standards development process as “bylaws”, but we use the term in this charter for continuity. This use does not imply a decision to continue use beyond this document.

The aim of the Taxon Names and Concepts group (TNC) is to

* promote the understanding and use of taxonomic names and their relation to described taxa (taxon concepts), and
* how these are related to other biodiversity information models such as those describing specimens and observations.

The primary scope of the TNC group includes Taxonomic Names as controlled by the codes of nomenclature, Taxon Concepts, Vernacular names and their relationships. However, in order to fully understand taxon names and concepts, the TNC group is interested in other TDWG standards in which taxon names and concepts are used or with which they are defined. In particular, taxonomic publications in which the names and concepts are described or cited; biological specimens which typify the taxon names, circumscribe the concepts or that may have been identified as belonging to a particular taxon; and character descriptions that are used in describing taxonomic concepts.

The group

* develops and promotes the use of standard data models for representing taxon names and taxon concepts (taxa),
* monitors their use and where appropriate proposes changes to the standards,
* produces reference implementations and tools and
* documentation and publications promoting the appropriate use of taxonomic names and concepts.

The project will improve the following aspects of TDWG operations:

* Web site for managing and documenting TDWG standards
* Open standards development process (based on models and experiences of other standards organisations such as IETF, Open GIS Consortium, W3C)
* Support and coordination activities for Subgroups
* Publicity for TDWG standards
* Development of reusable software components to support TDWG standards
* Implementation of a shared system for managing globally unique identifiers for biodiversity data elements
* Planning of long-term support requirements and securing appropriate long-term funding.

The TDWG Technical Architecture Group
- Develops a common standards development architecture,
- Maintains technical compatibility between TDWG standards and those produced by other groups.
- Produces a yearly technical roadmap and
- Provides both formal and informal advice to the TDWG Executive and membership.

Support is acknowledged from: GBMF

Most primary biodiversity data consists of observations of organisms in the environment, or specimens collected in the environment and stored within Natural History collections. There is sufficient overlap in the information stored in observational data and specimen records to allow existing data exchange schemas to integrate these data types. However, specific data types have unique requirements that need to be addressed. The purpose of this Interest Group is to explore concepts and methods of biodiversity data description, integration and transfer that fully integrate specimen and observational data into existing data exchange schemas.

The Group is developing a lightweight data standard for describing entire collections of natural history materials. Collection description records are intended to be verbose and so are different from the rows of data that are more usual in item-level databases. They also record information about access to, and usage of, the collection and where to get more detailed information.

There are many fine collections that have no database or other Web presence and so are in danger of being overlooked by researchers as we become more reliant on the Web to reveal what exists. A brief descriptive record can act as the “business card” of a collection, providing enough information to identify and locate it. Collections descriptions have several other uses, as described in the section on history and context below.

A subset of the standard will be used in a similar way as the “business card” of organisations in the area of biodiversity research. Such organisations are often known by a code and multi-disciplinary organisations may have a different code in each discipline. NCD records will allow an organisation to be identified from a code and provide information on its other codes, if applicable.

Support is acknowledged from: SYNTHESYS; RAVNS

• A very common entry point to biological information is through associated geospatial information, for example, the latitude and longitude of a specimen collection. Every observation or collection of an organism from a natural environment has a time and place associated with its occurrence. Associating organism occurrence with quantitative map coordinates allows us to address numerous informatics, biological research and practical management problems. Mapping and analyzing geographic distributions of organisms or communities is a basic requirement in environmental management.

• Founding members of this interest group recognized that there is a broader geospatial standards community addressing issues highly relevant to TDWG. There is a need to appraise and facilitate use of generic standards within biological community. A major goal of the GIG is to examine geospatial standards and to make recommendations for their use in biological information systems. The GIG is also in a position to advice geospatial standards groups on bioinformatics.

• The GIG is the appropriate venue for organising and spawning new geospatially related Task Groups for TDWG.

The goal of the group is to develop standard computer-based mechanisms for expressing and transferring descriptive information about biological specimens, taxa, as well as similar entities such as diseases. The exchanged data may include terminologies, ontologies, descriptions, identification tools and associated resources. The developed standards shall allow capture, transport, caching and archiving of descriptive data, using platform- and application-independent means.

Such a standard is crucial to enabling lossless porting of data between existing and future software platforms including identification, data-mining and analysis tools, and federated databases.

* The SDD Standard:
o provides a flexible, platform-independent data structure for the capture and storage of taxonomic descriptions, including original data (sample data)
o provides data structures for the support of multi-access (interactive matrix-based keys) as well as sequential (dichotomous/polytomous) identification keys (traditional keys)
o comprises a superset of data requirements of all known programs managing descriptive data
o provides extension beyond existing programs where data requirements are believed to be predictable
o is readily extensible to account for future developments and data requirements
o is human-readable (although it is assumed that in almost all cases standard descriptions will be machine-generated and processed)
o is XML-based, and provides a schema for validation of documents and the use of schema compilers such as XML-beans for the production of schema-based SDD tool generation.
* It facilitates:
o lossless porting of data between standard-aware applications
o achievable progressive markup of legacy descriptions, particularly natural-language descriptions
o comparability and combinability of alternate descriptions of any one taxon
o multlingual data sets
o efficient reusable descriptions serving multiple purposes
o archiving and sharing of raw and processed data
* It encourages:
o Structured data over unstructured
o Documenting IPR metadata, including Open access licenses
o Recording data on a specimen level rather than on a taxon level.

The core SDD group is considering defining a subset, "SDD Lite" of the current schema, with the particular goal of producing a representation in RDF of the main concerns of SDD, in furtherance of TDWG's goal to have RDF representations of its major ontologically-related standards. Hence, the SDD Interest Group especially seeks people interested, and with suitable experience in, the use of Semantic Web technologies for describing taxa.

Support is acknowledged from: GBIF

The purpose of this group is to standardize the use of globally unique identifiers within the Biodiversity Informatics community.

Note: This charter is temporary and will be replaced by the final version when that is approved by the Executive Committee.

The TAPIR subgroup will draft, document and maintain the TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval) Standard for TDWG.

TAPIR specifies a standardised, stateless, HTTP transmittable, XML-based request and response protocol for accessing structured data that may be stored on any number of distributed databases of varied physical and logical structure. TAPIR combines and extends the features of the BioCASe[1] and DiGIR[2] protocols to create a new and more generic means of communication between client applications and data providers using the Internet. The TAPIR subgroup will ensure the applicability and effectiveness of the protocol through association with the development of the PyWrapper v2[3] reference implementation.

TAPIR was developed for use with biodiversity and natural science collection data but is a generic tool applicable to other domains. The TAPIR subgroup will maintain awareness of the potential for interoperability with other subject domains and the protocols that are used or are under development in those domains, and will consider the benefits or problems of convergence with them. The TAPIR subgroup will liaise with other TDWG subgroups and allied working groups to ensure compatibility of approach and avoid duplication of effort particularly with related biodiversity standards initiatives.

Note: This charter is temporary and will be replaced by the final version when that is approved by the Executive Committee.

[1] Biological Collections Access Service: http://www.biocase.org/products/protocols/

[2] Distributed Generic Information Retrieval: http://www.digir.net/

[3] See: http://www.pywrapper.org/

The Darwin Core has been a de facto standard for biodiversity occurrence data exchange since it was first proposed in 2001. Since then, without official standard status and without a clear mechanism for extension, several flavors of the Darwin Core have proliferated, defeating the overall goal of data interoperability for which it was meant as a solution. The proposal of this task group is to make Darwin Core and two of its broadly used extensions into accepted standards.

Darwin Core is designed to facilitate the exchange of information about the geographic occurrence of organisms and the physical existence of biotic specimens in collections. Extensions to the Darwin Core provide a mechanism to share additional information, which may be discipline-specific, or beyond the commonly agreed upon scope of the Darwin Core itself. The Darwin Core and its extensions are minimally restrictive of information content by design, since doing so would render the standard useless for the implementation of data quality tools.

Support is acknowledged from: Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; US National Science Foundation

The purpose of the ABCD Task Group is to foster accessibility of existing and emerging biological collection data banks at the international level by developing and maintaining a comprehensive and commented schema for biological collection records (ABCD Schema). In the process, it foments standardization of the terminology used to model biological collection information and provides a general format for data exchange and retrieval for biological collections.

The intended outcome of this working group is to derive consensus on modeling strategies for achieving observational data interoperability. To accomplish this goal we will solicit and follow recommendations from a broad community of researchers to develop a core semantic model for scientific observations onto which current and future data models can be mapped. Key to the success of the proposed core semantic model will be outreach to the broader environmental science communities and stakeholders. The goal will be to engage a diverse group of community members to contribute requirements and use cases, and provide feedback on proposed approaches, ultimately leading to ratification of a specification for observational data modeling.

Support is acknowledged from: US National Science Foundation