Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) Interest Group

Rationale

The goal of this Interest Group is to discuss, determine, formalize and standardize concepts, problems, policies, metadata, methodologies and mechanisms related to Biodiversity Data Quality, collaboratively and incrementally, and to promote associated best practices throughout the Biodiversity Informatics community. Data quality is a major concern in Biodiversity Informatics. The distributed nature of data acquisition and digitization, the specific difficulties imposed by some of the data sub-domains, such as taxonomic data and geographic data, among other aspects, make it important to discuss data quality in biodiversity so that data made available in portals and other systems can be used for various purposes such as education, science, and decision making. Although several initiatives in the Biodiversity Informatics community have been striving to develop tools and best practices about Data Quality, we lack a common background and consensus related to concepts, metadata, policies, and methodologies that would increase the synergy in achieving solutions for improving the fitness-for-use of biodiversity data. In this Interest Group we want to develop this common background and help standardize the way to deal with Data Quality in the Biodiversity Informatics community, avoiding duplication of efforts and sharing knowledge and solutions.

How to contribute

You can use the GitHub issues to contribute with amendment or starting relevant discussion topics. Conventionaly, title of issues should start with "[IG]" for issue related to the BDQ Interest Group, "[TG1]" for issues related to the Task Group 1, "[TG2]" for issues related to the Task Group 2, "[TG3]" for issues related to the Task Group 3 and "[TG4]" for issues related to the Task Group 4.

You can join the group's mailing list at http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-bdq. To be involved and receive notification via the GitHub. click "Watch" (above) and select "Watching" to be notified of all conversations.

Documentation

All Interest Group and Task Group documents are linked on the Interest Group's Wiki.

Draft Standard Documents

The standard will incorporate (placeholders in the above document) the following:

Descriptions of the CORE texts, authoriative CSV file, from which a human readable reference guide to the test descriptions will be generated (replacing the markdown tables in the github issues).

Data for validating implementations of the tests and Data including non-printing characters for validating tests that assess EMPTY

Rationale management for CORE tests in comments on GitHub issues, one per test

Combined Framework and Biodiversity Data Quality vocabularies, development of definitions in github issue 152

Draft export of Framework OWL to CSV, work in progress, definitions to be updated from Vocabularies issue 152 and an OWL representation of the framework developed in part by Robert A. Morris, definitions to be updated form Vocabularies issue #152

OLD BDQ CORE Standards Document ‐ NO LONGER IN USE

Task Groups

• CLOSED: Task Group 1 (Framework on Data Quality)

• Task Group 2 ( Data Quality Tests and Assertions)

• CLOSED: Task Group 3 (Data Quality Use Cases)

• Task Group 4 (Best Practices for Development of Vocabularies of Value)