State of the (Re-)Ratification of ABCD 2.06 and ABCD EFG under the SDS Guidelines

Abstract

ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data, Holetschek et al. 2012) 2.06 was ratified by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) in September 2005. In 2017, TDWG ratified the Standards Documentation Standard (SDS, Vocabulary Maintenance Specification Task Group 2017), which is a set of regulations and guidelines on how TDWG standards should be structured and documented. Since then, ABCD has been classified with “2005 standards” on the TDWG standards website. However, with the planned ratifications of the ABCD Extension for Geoscience (ABCD EFG, Petersen et al. 2018) and the more semantic ABCD 3.0 (Fichtmueller et al. 2019), it became necessary to also ratify ABCD 2.06 under the SDS rules. In this talk, we will report on the progress of the ratification processes, both for ABCD 2.06 and ABCD EFG. In particular we want to address the specific challenges that arose from fitting existing XML schemas into the SDS structure and documenting them accordingly.