baskaufs
commented
4 years ago At its 2019-08-29 meeting, the Maintenance Group decided to initiate the work required to add RFC 2119 statements to the AC Term List and Structure documents (the two AC documents containing normative content).
The Audubon Core Structure and Term List documents both contain material that is declared to be normative. Within that normative material, words like "recommended", "MUST NOT", "may", etc. are used without a clear indication as to whether they are being used colloquially or as key words in the strict sense of ]RFC 2119](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119).
This problem needs to be corrected both for clarity and also for conformance with Section 3.2.5 of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification. The SDS does not require use of RFC 2119 keywords, but it does indicate that the ALL CAPS formatting typical of RFC 2119 must not be used unless a document indicates that RFC 2119 is in effect. There is at least one violation of this in the AC Term List document.
We should evaluate both of these documents as to whether RFC 2119 should be implemented in them or not. In either case, it would be a good idea to state whether it is in force for the document or not. I think that at least in the case of the definitions and usage guidelines in the Term List document, it should be in force.