Call for comments on Taxonomic Concept Schema V2
The new version of TCS is a vocabulary standard, expressed in RDF rather than XML schema, and covers terms for both taxonomic concpets and taxonomic nomenclature.
Call for comments on the new version of the Taxon Concept Schema (TCS)
The Taxon Concept Schema (TCS) Maintenance Group would like to announce the start of a minimum 30-day period for public review of a major new version of TCS, Taxon Concept Standard (TCS) 2.
TCS 2 is a major revision of TCS and comes with a proposal to change the name of the standard from ‘Taxon Concept Schema’ to ‘Taxon Concept Standard’. The purpose of the present revision was to convert TCS to a vocabulary standard, like Darwin Core, that does not prescribe a data format and that can be maintained under the Vocabulary Maintenance Standard (VMS). At this stage, we do not add any new concepts that were not already in TCS 1, but they can be proposed for addition later in a similar process that is already in place for other current TDWG standards.
Because this is a major change, the VMS requires a Feature Report and an Implementation Experience Report. These documents, together with the Term List and some other documentation, can be accessed from the Documentation page of the TCS2 GitHub repository. As an indication that there is still ample room for community input and improvement, no website has been created yet.
The best way to participate in the public review is to comment on the GitHub issues that have been created for each term. These GitHub issues are linked to from the Term List and can also be accessed from the TCS 2 Initial Release Milestone. For discussions that span multiple terms, or that might result in a lot of comments, we will create separate GitHub Discussions.
We are organising two information and discussion sessions during the TDWG Working Sessions that will be held from 14 to 25 April, one on Wednesday, April 16, at 10:00 UTC and another on Thursday, April 17, at 21:00 UTC. Please go to the Working Sessions 2025 page on the TDWG website to register if you are interested in attending one (or both) of these events. These sessions will be very good opportunities to learn more about and contribute to TCS. We hope to see many of you there.
Your comments are welcome and are important to make TCS the active standard that we want it to be.
Thank you,
The TCS Maintenance Group