Report of the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group (VoMaG)

This report constitutes the outcome of the TDWG Vocabulary Management Task Group (VoMaG). It consists of an introduction and four sections. The introduction describes the remit of VoMaG and the three task areas that emerged based on its charter, each of which is dealt with in separate sections. The first area (Section 2) relates to the status of the TDWG Ontology and its relationship to existing TDWG standards. It also examines the Darwin Core Namespace Policy as a means to maintain technical specification standards that define vocabularies, and provides recommendations for actions that would resolve several long-standing issues. The second area (Section 3 and Section 4) deals with the use of Semantic MediaWiki as a community platform for developing and maintaining vocabularies and with the NCBO BioPortal as a tool for sharing ontologies. It looks at the core features provided by MediaWiki, the enhancements provided by the Semantic MediaWiki extension, the implementation of the ViBRANT/GBIF terms wiki on Biowikifarm, and the advantages of BioPortal for ontologies (as opposed to vocabularies). The third area (Section 5) addresses the requirements for a framework for managing vocabularies, identifying the main components and a suggested workflow. Sections include recommendations for consideration by TDWG.