Welcome to the home of SDD within the Biological Descriptions interest group

Note: The former SDD TDWG subgroup has renamed itself and is now the "Biological Descriptions" Interest group. As a result, the SDD wiki will be demoted to a taskgroup wiki soon.

This is a web-based collaboration area for discussions of the subgroup on the Structure of Descriptive Data of the Taxonomic Data Working Group. We welcome your contributions - please see the bottom of this page if you are new to this Wiki.

Starter Topics

• *Especially useful: * RealWorldExamples_SDD1dot1

• Version 1.1 was released on 20 Mar 2007, and last updated in revision 5 on 2010-03-15; discussion at DiscussionFor1dot1. It is recommended that all usage of SDD should refer to this version rather than to the older 1.0.
• Services or programs using SDD
• History and context of SDD
• SDD development is now supported by a Primer. The primer is based on version 1.1 RC 1; the few minor technical corrections of the release relative to this release candidate should in general not affect the primer. Please inform us if you detect any problems with the primer.

• After the changes to the constitution and the new Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) process we need to submit a new charter for both an Interest Group and a Task Group.
  • QUESTION: should the name remain SDD, or should it be changed to Structured Descriptive Data and Identification (SDI)?
  • Biological Descriptions Interest Group Charter?
  • SDD SchemaTaskGroupMain.BDI.Charter
  • Who is interested in incremental markup of taxonomic treatments in digitized legacy systematics literature, that goes into the detail like SDD? TaxonX? is so far largely complementary to Anybody wants to form a new task group?
  • Note: The previous Charter revisions are still available in the history of Charter

• The SDD group is considering defining a subset of the current SDD Schema, "SDD Lite" with the goal of producing a representation of the main concerns of “SDD Lite” would try to use the RDF/OWL technology currently preferred by some other groups of TDWG and intended to be TDWG's new common development architecture. Hence, the SDD Interest Group especially seeks people interested, and with suitable experience in, the use of Semantic Web technologies for describing taxa. THIS may require setting up a new task group. Who is interested in this?

Ongoing discussions

• ClarificationOfScientificNamesInLabel
• DiscussionFor1dot1
• SDD2006BerlinSummary
• TextCharacterDiscussion
• ConceptStateDiscussion
• SyntheticData
• RDFand Also, see the discussion at the GUID Wiki and TDWG-TAG as well.
• WhatToDoWithElementsMarkedForDiscussion: "double underbar elements" are only for discussion, all will be removed when finalizing!

Interesting related links:

• Identify Life project
• Electronic Field Guide
• Kew Interactive Key Forum
• Lucid,
• Digitaltaxonomy: Overview Identification and Description software

Material below is outdated, we need to revise this soon!

SDD Topics

• Charter
• PrimerHome- please contribute to this - the Primer will be authored collaboratively on this wiki
• DELTAandSDD
• SchemaDiscussion (main topic, currently referring to SDD 1.1)
• An up-to-date version of the schema should always be in CurrentSchemaVersion!
• MeetingMinutes (rich discussion content rather than formal minutes!) and MailingList (including archives)
• ToolsForSDD
• ImplementationsOfSDD
• SDDAsNativeStore Issues about querying and other XML database issues arising when SDD is the underlying data representation.
• Suggested citations for the standard itself as well as for the primer.

Notes for WIKI newcomers:

• If you are new to wikis, learn how to use it in ThreeEasySteps.
• Click on TWikiRegistration to register if you want to contribute
• This wiki is open to anyone interested in the topic, but you must be a registered user to edit pages and add content. Register at the TWikiRegistration? page.
• See TWikiUsers for a list of current subscribers.
• See Main Main.WebHome for a list of all Wiki Webs supported on this site.
• Want automatic email notifications when a topic on this web is modified? Simply add your wiki name to WebNotify.
• Topic name conventions: topics renamed to ResolvedTopic... or ClosedTopic... are still valuable to read, but old and not relevant to ongoing discussions. Topics renamed to ZZZObsolete are resolved or closed topics that I consider no longer intelligable based on the current version of the schema.

Until May 2006 this wiki was hosted by the Electronic Field Guide project. Many thanks to Bob Morris and his colleagues of the University of Massachusetts at Boston!