SDD2006BerlinSummary

TDWG SDD Technical Review Meeting

3-7. April 2006
Federal Biological Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry, Berlin, Germany

1. Goals

The goal was to resolve outstanding technical and substantial issues resulting from implementations of the UBIF and SDD Schema version 1.0 finalized at the previous TDWG meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. The motivation for the changes were to achieve a solid foundation for an improved primer and technical documentation. Earlier documentation created for intermediate versions is now obsolete.

2. Participants

• Bob Morris,
• Gregor Hagedorn
• Jacob Asiedu
• Damian Barnier (not Friday)
• Kevin Thiele (not Friday)
• Markus Döring (only Tuesday)

3. Outcomes

The technical issues (especially schema validation under different software implementation) were resolved on the first day. The core problem was the relationship between descriptive concepts, characters, and character or concept hierarchizations. The (recurring) underlying problem is that SDD has to satisfy both operational and fundamental concepts. While the intention was to release a minor revision ("SDD 1.01"), the outcome after the agreed changes was called SDD version 1.1.

The meeting drafted the SDD [Charter] as recommended by the TDWG TIP and Process groups, discussed and revised the SDD presentation requested by Roger Hyam for the TAG meeting in Edinburgh (SDD participant: G. Hagedorn).

4. Outlook

Although initial implementations of SDD 1.0 were already carried out, wider implementation attempts were hampered by the lack of sufficient documentation and examples. Implementations of SDD 1.1 are agreed for Lucid and the EFG guides, and it is hoped that further groups find the resources to implement SDD. The next meeting called "SDD lite" will try to address this by bringing potential implementers together and defining a subset of SDD containing those concepts most urgently needed by these groups. The SDD Lite meeting will also review and update the primer and techncial documentation, and may result in an explicit "profile" of SDD with a reduced complexity.

For further details of the discussions held see the technical report and meeting minutes.

-- GregorHagedorn - 24 May 2006