Since I am not a domain expert on geosciences, I don't have specific comments about the contents of the EFG extension. However, I do have a general question about the status of the EFG extension.
The ABCD standard itself falls into the category of "Current (2005) standard". See the list of standards. The significance of this is stated on the Standards Status and Categories page, which says "Standards that TDWG recommends for use and were ratified by membership vote at the TDWG Annual Meeting 2005 in St. Petersburgh. These standards are not in the format of current TDWG standards, nor have they been submitted to both expert and public review, the ratification process adopted at the St Louis annual meeting in 2006."
So my question is: what will be the status of the EFG extension given that ABCD itself is not a current standard? It is hard for me to see how EFG can be assigned the status of "Current Standard" given that it extends a standard that is not up to the current requirements for standards. On the other hand, it does not make sense to me that it be assigned to the "Current (2005) Standard" category either, given that that category was created for a very particular situation that no longer exists.
It seems to me that it would make sense to first move ABCD to the status of "Current Standard", then add EFG as an extension also having the status of "Current Standard". I don't think that would require a large amount of time or effort. The two issues with the 2005 standards are that they "are not in the format of current TDWG standards" and that they haven't "been submitted to both expert and public review".
On the first point, it would not take a large effort to create a list of terms document conforming to the Standards Documentation Specification (SDS) and couple that document with a second document explaining where to find usage guides and other necessary documents such as the XML schema. I'm not currently seeing clear links to those kinds of things on the standard's landing page of the TDWG website.
On the second point, it seems like the Executive Committee could reach a decision about the necessity of any kind of public or expert review of the existing ABCD standard. Given that it has been in wide use for many years, it seems to me that it had been proven that it "works", so a review at this point seems superfluous.
The third thing, which was not mentioned in the description of the "Current (2005) Standard", is for ABCD to have a Vocabulary Maintenance Group. This is a requirement of the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification that did not exist when the "Current (2005) Standard" category was designated. Again, meeting this requirement would not be complicated, nor time consuming. The current maintainers of ABCD would just need to write a charter similar to those of the Darwin and Audubon Core Maintenance Groups, submit it, and keep doing what they are already doing.
Going through these relatively simple steps with the core ABCD standard and moving it into the "Current Standards" category prior to the adoption of the EFG extension would make sense to me because that would allow the same mechanisms to be applied to EFG as to ABCD. The ABCD Maintenance Group would be assigned to also maintain EFG. The template used to generate an SDS-compliant list of terms for ABCD could be used to generate an SDS-compliant list of terms for EFG. See this page for information about how a CSV export of term names and definitions can be used to generated such a list of terms.
Since I am not a domain expert on geosciences, I don't have specific comments about the contents of the EFG extension. However, I do have a general question about the status of the EFG extension.
The ABCD standard itself falls into the category of "Current (2005) standard". See the list of standards. The significance of this is stated on the Standards Status and Categories page, which says "Standards that TDWG recommends for use and were ratified by membership vote at the TDWG Annual Meeting 2005 in St. Petersburgh. These standards are not in the format of current TDWG standards, nor have they been submitted to both expert and public review, the ratification process adopted at the St Louis annual meeting in 2006."
So my question is: what will be the status of the EFG extension given that ABCD itself is not a current standard? It is hard for me to see how EFG can be assigned the status of "Current Standard" given that it extends a standard that is not up to the current requirements for standards. On the other hand, it does not make sense to me that it be assigned to the "Current (2005) Standard" category either, given that that category was created for a very particular situation that no longer exists.
It seems to me that it would make sense to first move ABCD to the status of "Current Standard", then add EFG as an extension also having the status of "Current Standard". I don't think that would require a large amount of time or effort. The two issues with the 2005 standards are that they "are not in the format of current TDWG standards" and that they haven't "been submitted to both expert and public review".
On the first point, it would not take a large effort to create a list of terms document conforming to the Standards Documentation Specification (SDS) and couple that document with a second document explaining where to find usage guides and other necessary documents such as the XML schema. I'm not currently seeing clear links to those kinds of things on the standard's landing page of the TDWG website.
On the second point, it seems like the Executive Committee could reach a decision about the necessity of any kind of public or expert review of the existing ABCD standard. Given that it has been in wide use for many years, it seems to me that it had been proven that it "works", so a review at this point seems superfluous.
The third thing, which was not mentioned in the description of the "Current (2005) Standard", is for ABCD to have a Vocabulary Maintenance Group. This is a requirement of the Vocabulary Maintenance Specification that did not exist when the "Current (2005) Standard" category was designated. Again, meeting this requirement would not be complicated, nor time consuming. The current maintainers of ABCD would just need to write a charter similar to those of the Darwin and Audubon Core Maintenance Groups, submit it, and keep doing what they are already doing.
Going through these relatively simple steps with the core ABCD standard and moving it into the "Current Standards" category prior to the adoption of the EFG extension would make sense to me because that would allow the same mechanisms to be applied to EFG as to ABCD. The ABCD Maintenance Group would be assigned to also maintain EFG. The template used to generate an SDS-compliant list of terms for ABCD could be used to generate an SDS-compliant list of terms for EFG. See this page for information about how a CSV export of term names and definitions can be used to generated such a list of terms.