TDWG Taxonomic Concept Schema (TCS)

The Taxonomic Concept Schema is a standard under development by TDWG to express concept information dealing with taxonomic names and their associated interpretations in a standardized exchange format. The SEEK project initially looked into a variety of identifier schemes to be used as global identifiers for taxonomic concepts. Dave Thau from SEEK produced several white papers summarizing the pros and cons of the two main contenders, LSID and DOI/Handle. The TCS schema group eventually settled on the use of LSID as the standard format for identifiers, mainly due to two overwhelming benefits of LSIDs:

1. LSIDs follow Internet-standard URN naming conventions, so can be used wherever a URI is required
2. LSIDs are an open standard that can be implemented without a per-identifier fee, which is not always the case for DOIs