Complete implementation of adopted parts of Proposal for Categorizing Standards

[baskaufs]

@peterdesmet Since this involves some navigation changes and changing the standards page (whose generation I don't understand), can you do the first two items?

The Proposal for Categorizing Standards was adopted by the Executive Committee in December 2023. Some parts of it have already been implemented. The purpose of this issue is to lay out the remaining parts that need to be completed.

• Proposal 2 is partially implemented in that the page for standards not maintained by TDWG has been created: https://www.tdwg.org/standards/externally-managed/. However, it is not yet linked anywhere. The proposal was to change "Standards" at the top of the TDWG website from a link to a dropdown menu. The menu should have one item for the current standards page https://www.tdwg.org/standards/, probably with the label "Current standards", and an additional menu item linking to the new page, probably labeled "Externally managed standards". If at some point in the future standards were retired, we would add a third item for the page of retired standards described in Proposal 1. I think there should also be a regular hyperlink on the current standards page to the externally managed page.
• Proposal 3 involves separating the standards on the current standards page into two lists: "Actively maintained" (at the top of the page), and "Not under active maintenance" (at the bottom of the page). The actively maintained list should include Darwin Core, Audiovisual Core, TAPIR, the SDS, the VMS, the GUID/LSID AS, ABCD, TCS, and the WGSRPD. The not under active maintenance list should include Economic Botany Data Collection Standard, Floristic Regions of the World, HISPID3, ITF2, POSS, SDD and XDF. The following standards should be removed from the current standards page since they are now on the page of externally managed standards: Authors of Plant Names, BPH, BPH Supplementum, DELTA, Index Herbariorum, and TL-2. I think this covers all of them but we can double-check this against the proposal to make sure.
• Proposal 4 involves removing the Standards classification from the standards level to the document level. @baskaufs can take care of this once the other changes have been finished and submit a pull request. Just ping me.

The proposal by @peterdesmet for categorizing standards is still being studied by the TAG, so it isn't being implemented here.

[peterdesmet]

Hi @baskaufs, sorry for the late reaction. Why not have the standards header have 3 items/pages:

• Actively maintained (= "Actively maintained", url: /standards/
• Externally maintained (= "Externally managed standards", /standards/externally-maintained/)
• Not maintained (= "Not under active maintenance", /standards/not-maintained/)

I'm suggesting this because Proposal 3 would require me to handcraft the list on the standards page into two sections (rather than using a handy template). It's definitely doable though, but I thought to ask first.

Also, I suggest to used "maintained" in all text and links (not managed). Thoughts?

[baskaufs]

Hi @peterdesmet Just getting caught up on this. I don't have an issue with what you suggested and honestly, I think it would put more emphasis on our actively maintained standards. What I am unsure about is how much latitude we have in deviating from the proposal that was accepted by the Executive Committee. I think that what you have suggested is in the spirit of the proposal and cleaner, so perhaps just do it so that we could see how it looks, then check with the Executive and revert if necessary. The main reason for making a proposal at all was to overcome the inertia of people saying that the standards page was pathetic but not actually doing anything about it. So fixing it in any way would be preferable to leaving it in its current state, which makes it hard for people to find the actively used standards.

[stanblum]

A while ago, Peter asked me to draft up something that approximates what we would like the standards page to look like. I did that and shared it Ely, asking for feedback, but that was probably right when we were in the middle of reviewing abstracts or a zillion other things going on in TDWG. So I just pinged her again, asking for feedback. My idea was to order them by subject, not alphabetically or chronologically, because our names for standards often give no indication of what the standard is for. The recent approval of the Humboldt Extension also highlighted that we are not very consistent in how we make landing pages (or page sections) for "standards". And given that, programming something to extract even just the standard name from a referenced page seems ill advised. (See chrono, eco, and other parts of the DwC.) 🤷‍♂️ -Stan

[baskaufs]

Just a note about the landing page for the standards. The key required features of a standards landing page are prescribed by the SDS in section 3.1. This section of the SDS was intended to fix two serious problems that existed prior to its adoption:

1. It was impossible to know what exactly was included and not included in the standard.
2. There was no consistent way to know who was maintaining the standard and how one could participate in the development of the standards.

Stan, you say that we are not consistent about how we make landing pages. I don't get that. At least when all of the landing pages were initially created, they were very consistent about what they included. They always had the basic metadata required by the SDS, if vocabularies, how they are maintained and by whom, followed by a list of included vocabularies, then by a list of documents that are part of the standard (with links allowing one to access those standards). Some of the pages may have deviated from that over time since they are manually maintained, but I don't think most of the old standards pages have changed at all since they were created. So what do you see as inconsistent about them?

[peterdesmet]

So fixing it in any way would be preferable to leaving it in its current state

I'm starting a pull request.

@baskaufs in your list, you didn't cover "Plant Names in Botanical Databases". Where does that one go?

[baskaufs]

@baskaufs in your list, you didn't cover "Plant Names in Botanical Databases". Where does that one go?

Oops. In the list of those not under active maintenance.

[peterdesmet]

I figured. See PR at #546