Revise TNC Charter

[nielsklazenga]

We need to, or think it is a good idea to, send a revised charter to the TDWG Executive. The document that is being worked on is https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/blob/master/charter.md.

To be completed by 21 Nov. 2018

[jgerbracht]

I'm not sure that we want to go very deeply into Vernacular Names. At least in birds, and I expect it's also the case with many other macro taxa, the list of Vernacular Names for a taxa can easily approach 100. That said, if we do want to tackle Vernacular Names, I think we can provide a structure based on ISO 3166 and 639 which would cover most cases.

In "The Interest Group's goal for this year " relating to "provides for the needs of the various types of users and use cases of Taxonomic Names". Since this will deal in names to begin with, should we add another bullet like "will be extended in the future to include a robust taxonomic concept schema" or something similar?

Does this group have the responsibility to "produces reference implementations and tools" ? Personally, I hope so.

[nielsklazenga]

Thanks @jgerbracht. Good to get some discussion going on the charter.

Yes, we should change the summary. I think just removing the capitals and the vernacular names from the first sentence:

The primary scope of the TNC group includes Taxonomic Names as controlled by the codes of nomenclature, Taxon Concepts, Vernacular names and their relationships.

might be a start.

I don't think we want the taxon concepts back in. Taxon concepts are the esoteric things that are in taxonomists' heads, not things that lend themselves to be easily put into a database or a transfer schema. I think our TaxonomicNameUsage is the TCS TaxonConcept and that the TaxonConcept is perhaps the most poorly understood part of TCS and that replacing it with TaxonomicNameUsage will enable more rather than less robust specification and implementations. While the specification that we'll come up with can of course be extended later on, we are not leaving out anything that is currently in TCS, not even to begin with. I would like to hear some others' opinion about this.

We are an Interest Group, so if we think we should get into reference implementations and tools, we can do so and I would like to do that too. We should put something in the charter about what we want to do beyond producing the specification (we are kind of acting as a Task Group at the moment) and make it a little less vague than it is now.

Looks like the charter needs a bit more rewriting than I had envisaged. However, I am happy to exceed the self-imposed deadline of 21 November if that leads to a better-considered charter. I opened this issue only because I needed an issue to get a card on the project board (that I set up yesterday), but let's use it to further discuss what the charter should look like.

[jar398]

The charter can be amended later with the EC if necessary. I think it's important to have it submitted and accepted before much more work is done [here].

[jar398]

I am still interested in the topic of an improved 'taxon concept' vocabulary but am working on it elsewhere. I don't think it's a good idea for me to continue technical collaboration in a group that is neither clearly informal nor clearly part of the TDWG process. Happy to come back once there's an EC-approved charter, or to discuss a charter in this issue thread.

[jliljeblad]

Actually, as a manager of the Swedish taxonomic database Dyntaxa, I would like to contribute with whatever I can here. Our implementation is based more around a taxon concept (implying that it is an hypothesis rather than a reality). The model has long included the ability to track historical changes such and splits and lumps, and has recently been improved upon further. Since there is not yet a standard for this, we cannot include this kind of information when exporting, e.g. a DwC-A to GBIF. I've worked with this system for over ten years now, and could provide use cases.

Also, I would hate to miss out on interesting discussions going on elsewhere!

[hlapp]

@jar398 do you have this work available somewhere? We need a taxon concept vocabulary within Phyloref, and so far we have been borrowing from the earlier TDWG Taxon Concept and Taxon Name ontologies (which I think figured under the – badly misnamed – "LSID" vocabularies).

[jliljeblad]

The only thing published is that of the founder of the database, Oskar Kindvall, who made a report to ETC Biodiversity a couple of years ago. What changes we've introduced since then, isn't readily available anywhere, but I could try to present it here the best I can.

The report can be found here: Kindvall (2015) Dyntaxa taxon concept administration and how to handle information related to taxa - ETC/BD Technical paper N°8/2015.

[jar398]

Re taxon concept administration - cool! Thanks.

I've been working with folks on a project I'm consulting for and on a university project I'm volunteering for; I don't want to drag specifics in without warning them since I'm not a PI on either. I just threw some thoughts together in a wiki in the past hour; this is highly personal and has little technical content: https://github.com/jar398/tnc/wiki

[jgerbracht]

It might also be worth reviewing the Denis Lepage paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109484/

[jar398]

Not enough hours in the day! I will put it on my list too. Thanks! ( Oh sorry yes I've seen the Avibase paper (and Avibase) ; it's inspirational )

[jliljeblad]

It might also be worth reviewing the Denis Lepage paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109484/

Yes, that is an interesting paper. However, our national database has a slightly different perspective in that 1) we only have a subset of the world's taxa (especially true for subspecies) which makes it difficult to compare concepts based on what child taxa are included and 2) ours is a consensus database whereas Avibase compares concepts across databases/publications.

[baskaufs]

OK, I'm getting really, really confused about this discussion. My impression was that there WAS a chartered group, open to the public and working within the TDWG process. The charter is here and @nielsklazenga is the group convener. I have participated in a number of calls, also open to the public. So I really don't understand this discussion. If you want to be involved, join the group.

[jar398]

Oh thanks Steve. I wasn't clear about this. Has it been submitting annual reports?

[jar398]

And the group's effort seems to be about a document (product), but there's no task group... so maybe I should go to https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/issues/52 ... where my concerns would be the same.

[baskaufs]

I've been mostly an observer in the group process, so I'd ask @nielsklazenga for confirmation about reports, etc. I'm also not sure about the task group vs. interest group thing. I'm pretty by the book on that kind of thing - for Audubon Core (which I am in charge of) we have chartered task groups for products we are planning to produce. But not everybody in TDWG is as process-oriented as I am and I'm not in charge of that group.

[jar398]

Submitting my question here is my way to ask @nielsklazenga . The answer should be of general interest (at least in this issue thread). I had some working group experience at W3C, and found there that a little attention to process usually increases a standards group's efficiency and effectiveness.

[jliljeblad]

Oh, I'm just not paying attention to in what thread the discussion was going - just that it was on Github. We should of course keep the discussion where it belongs. I briefely talked to Niels at TDWG in Leiden about contributing but haven't had a good opportunity to take my time.

[deepreef]

I just threw some thoughts together in a wiki in the past hour; this is highly personal and has little technical content: https://github.com/jar398/tnc/wiki

@jar398 : I took a quick look at your site and found it very interesting (especially this).

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, and for sharing!

Just to clarify my own position in all this: I'm less focused on TDWG process than I am on understanding the intersection between taxonomic process and informatics. Specifically, my goal/hope is to understand how to effectively characterize taxonomic process in a way that allows more effective analysis across broad datasets, such that the taxonomic process itself is informed and enhanced. And if done well, other biological disciplines (e.g., ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc.) will benefit as well.

The reason I've latched on to TNUs (I hate the term too, but several long discussions at various NOMINA meetings failed to come up with something better) as "proxies" for modelling taxa is that they are tangible and lend themselves well to informatic structure and analysis. And, they lie at the very heart of the taxonomic process itself. I would love to come up with an informatics model centered on biological entities, rather than bibliographic(ish)-anchored assertions about biological entities. But the problem is that the biological entities we want to model (taxa) don't actually seem to exist in nature -- they appear to exist only in the way that we make assertions about them.

We (taxonomist, informaticians, TDWG, TNC-group, etc,) have been wrestling for decades with the disconnect between what evolutionary processes actually yield in nature, and our human tendency to want to put things in discrete boxes. As much as I would love to generate a model that captures some representation of clusters of biological entities in nature, I don't yet see a pathway forward on that, at least until we can better understand the basis of such biological entities in nature.

I apologize if I completely missed your point on this; in which case just chalk the above up as another overly-long soapbox rant about the stuff I seem to always contribute overly-long rants about.

[nielsklazenga]

Sorry, I have been distracted by other work. @baskaufs is right, the TNC is a chartered group and from a TDWG process point of view we don't need to revise the charter. This was really about updating the TDWG website and the README at the front of this repository. I think it is important that we do that though and I took @jar398 's reminder to heart and have been postponing having a meeting until I had come up with a draft (and then kept postponing). We'll have a meeting next week though, and there will be a draft by then. Thanks @deepreef for your thoughts in the Wiki.

@jar398, the TNC has been more or less dormant for many years, but I did send a report to the TDWG council last year before the TDWG conference. Normally there are IG presentations in the closing session of the conference, but last year's conference was a special one.

@jliljeblad, contact me by email, so I can add you to the list.

[jar398]

@deepreef I'm going to answer you at #52, and will try to move discussion of the task group question to #52 now that I hear that the interest group itself is alive and healthy.

[jar398]

We discussed the maintenance interest group charter on today's call. I suggested that maybe we've decided that the TNC interest group wants to be the TCS maintenance interest group, and that met with agreement. Then I suggested that we track any charter work under this issue. @nielsklazenga If you agree with this analysis, then please reopen this issue and let us know your plans. I agree that little needs to be done, except to make it clear that this existing TNC interest group is volunteering to serve as the TCS maintenance interest group (see the vocabulary maintenance specification for process). It would be nice to get EC approval of this idea (by submitting a revised charter to them).

[nielsklazenga]

We submitted a charter for a TCS Maintenance Group in July last year, which was overlooked by the Executive. In the meantime, we have had a TCS 2 Task Group approved. Closing this for now. We can re-evaluate when the work of the TCS 2 Task Group has been completed.

[debpaul]

@nielsklazenga this TCS Maintenance Group was approved by the TDWG Executive Committee 2020-08-11. Not sure what happened with getting you a notice of this approval. Is it up on the website now? @stanblum maybe we can dig this up if it's not.

[nielsklazenga]

Thanks @debpaul , it is in this repository (https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/blob/master/charters/tcs-maintenance-group-charter.md), but I would not mind changing it a little before it goes on the website.

[stanblum]

I'm going to post the charter doc (referenced by Niels) on the website. @nielsklazenga, If you want to make changes, feel free. The Exec only needs to approve significant changes in or purpose. Changes that improve readability, clarity, additional resources, etc. don't need approval, though notification would of course be appreciated.

If you want to let group members continue to bash on the document in the repo, we can let it continue to evolve there, but it should be labeled as a draft in revision so that people are aware that the "official" charter is on the website and the flow from draft to "official" is clear.

On Thu, Nov 4, 2021 at 4:49 PM Niels Klazenga @.***> wrote:

Thanks @debpaul https://github.com/debpaul , it is in this repository ( https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/blob/master/charters/tcs-maintenance-group-charter.md), but I would not mind changing it a little before it goes on the website.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/tdwg/tnc/issues/12#issuecomment-961519161, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACKZUDI2YIPLQKJ3EERQYT3UKML2JANCNFSM4GCGTCRQ . Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675 or Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&referrer=utm_campaign%3Dnotification-email%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dgithub.

[nielsklazenga]

Thanks @stanblum . I think I will leave it as it is.