Implementation of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification

Abstract

The Standards Documentation Specification (SDS) was ratified as a TDWG standard in 2017 (Baskauf et al. 2017). It specified formatting guidelines for documents, but also established a data model for standards components and their versions. The SDS provided broad guidelines for Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) use, and associated specific metadata properties to particular components, but left many details to implementers. Since 2017, progress has been made toward implementing the requirements of the SDS. Part of that work was reformatting existing documents to comply with the standard, but another major effort was designation of IRI patterns, assembling the necessary metadata, and creating a system that can generate the many vocabulary-related documents necessary to comply with the SDS. Thse documents not only include human-readable documents, but also machine-readable documents that can be acquired through content negotiation. In addition, the system makes available dumps that can be loaded into a graph database for querying. In this presentation, we will review these developments and see how the newly-available machine-readable metadata can be used to answer questions about existing standards and future controlled vocabularies.