Task Group Meeting: 14 December 2021, 21:00–22:30 UTC

[nielsklazenga]

The next meeting of the TCS 2 Task Group will be held on 14 December 2021 at 21:00 UTC (see below for other time zones). The meeting will be held via WebEx. People who have been to our meetings before or have already indicated their interest will received an invitation with a meeting link by email. If you are not on the list yet, but are interested in receiving meeting invitations, please email me on niels.klazenga(at)rbg.vic.gov.au and I will put you on.

Agenda

We will be working through the classes in the order TaxonConcept, TaxonRelationship (TaxonAlignment), TaxonName, so this meeting we will commence with TaxonConcept. As I want most of the work to take place between rather than in meetings though, we will just discuss two proposals that came out of the TCS Maintenance Group meetings in the TDWG Working Sessions in November and spend the rest of the meeting discussing the best way to progress the work on TCS 2. Steve Baskauf will join us to help with that.

1. Consider specimenCircumscription and characterCircumscription out of scope for the TCS 2 Task Group

These terms have come up in our discussions sometimes but we do not have any well-established use cases and we do not really know what to do with them, so we could spend a long time on them without getting anywhere. I propose to consider them out of scope for now and maybe deal with circumscription properly at a later stage.

2. Add controlled terms for "shared common concepts" and OTUs to TaxonConceptCategory controlled vocabulary

I propose we adopt the Taxonomic Concept Categories from the Franz & Peet (2009) as a starting point. I think that the common concepts that are derived from Taxon Concepts from individual publications – cf. AviBase – are also best dealt with as a category of Taxon Concepts, rather than as a class of their own (we'll need to think of a better name though). Also, I think it would be good to have a category for OTUs. We do not have issues for either term yet, but will decide if we are going to add them.

3. Add properties for pro parte synonyms and misapplications

At the Maintenance Group meetings, I suggested that we could have properties for misapplications and pro parte synonyms, which (I think) are left over when we resolve the has synonym Taxon Relationship Type in TCS 1. I myself am in two minds about this, so we will need to have a champion if we want to look into it further.

4. Discussion on how to best move along with the work on TCS 2

I would like to get the terms in the TaxonConcept class finalised in the next couple of meetings, but I think that most of the work should be done between meetings, rather than during the meetings. So, in this meeting, I think we should at least decide which terms we want to have finalised by the next meeting (and what that means). We might also consider having hackathons again like we had before. We will also discuss next steps and what we need to have done before we take the next steps. As I said, Steve will join us to discuss this with us.

Meeting times

Location	Local Time	Time Zone	UTC Offset
Melbourne (Australia - Victoria)	Wednesday, 15 December 2021 at 8:00:00 am	AEDT	UTC+11 hours
Honolulu (USA - Hawaii)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 11:00:00 am	HST	UTC-10 hours
Fairbanks (USA - Alaska)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 12:00:00 noon	AKST	UTC-9 hours
San Francisco (USA - California)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 1:00:00 pm	PST	UTC-8 hours
St. Louis (USA - Missouri)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 3:00:00 pm	CST	UTC-6 hours
New York (USA - New York)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 4:00:00 pm	EST	UTC-5 hours
London (United Kingdom - England)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 9:00:00 pm	GMT	UTC
Stockholm (Sweden)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 10:00:00 pm	CET	UTC+1 hour
Berlin (Germany - Berlin)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 10:00:00 pm	CET	UTC+1 hour
Helsinki (Finland)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 11:00:00 pm	EET	UTC+2 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT)	Tuesday, 14 December 2021 at 21:00:00

[jar398]

Have the minutes from this meeting been posted?

[nielsklazenga]

Minutes

Attending: Nicholas Bailly, Steve Baskauf, Stan Blum, Anne Fuchs, Niels Klazenga, Johan Liljeblad, Rich Pyle, David Remsen, Mieke Strong, Andreas Müller, William Ulate, Cam Webb, Greg Whitbread

Apologies: Jeff Gerbracht

1. Consider specimenCircumscription and characterCircumscription out of scope for the TCS 2 Task Group

The group agreed with this, but noted that declaring these terms out of scope does not mean that these terms – or terms dealing with circumsciption/definition – are not important. Independently of the Task Group, a group of people is already working on circumscription. If this work is completed in time, we could consider adding it to the draft.

2. Add controlled terms for "shared common concepts" and OTUs to TaxonConceptCategory controlled vocabulary

While the group agrees that these things ("shared common concepts" and OTUs) are categories of Taxon Concepts, but there was a lot of discussion on the usefulness of the term and its vocabulary and in the end we decided to make it out of scope, the rationale being that the term is barely in TCS 1 (the way it is in TCS 1 is indeed not all that useful). At least one of us thinks the term is important, but is happy to make the case for a later release.

3. Add properties for "pro parte synonyms" and "misapplications"

There was a lot of discussion about whether these terms should be in TCS 2. Issues have now been created for these terms (#200 and #199 respectively), but only so we can continue the discussion. The case for having these properties still needs to be made.

4. Discussion on how to best move along with the work on TCS 2

• In order to progress the work on the Term List, we decided to have a "hackathon" in the 24 hours before each meeting in which we work on the term definitions and comments. We had decided in a previous meeting to have monthly meetings.

• Steve Baskauf (incoming convener of the TAG) joined us for this meeting and we discussed what other materials we need/want to have ready before review and/or ratification. We decided on the following:

  • user guide cf. TCS 1 User Guide
  • worked out examples, meaning at least full Taxon Concept records with associated Taxon Name, References and Alignments. Niels to create a markdown document in the tdwg/tcs2 repo. for a list (we can discus this further at the next meeting).

Next meeting

January 2022.