Welcome to the NCD web

Welcome to the home of NCD. This web-based collaboration area (wiki) is used for discussions of the NCD Subgroup of the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG).

If you are new to wikis, learn how to use it in ThreeEasySteps. This wiki is open to anyone interested in the topic, but you must be a registered user to edit pages and add content.

For more information, please contact:

• Neil Thomson (n.thomson AT nhm.ac.uk), Subgroup Convener, or
• Ricardo Pereira (ricardo-at-tdwg-dot-org), System Administrator

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Table of Contents

Introduction to Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD)

Natural Collections Descriptions is an emerging data standard for describing collections of natural history materials at the collection level - in other words, one NCD record describes one entire collection.

It is intended primarily as a lightweight resource description standard that is specific to natural history and lies between general resource discovery standards such as Dublin Core (DC) and rich collection description standards such as the Encoded Archival Description (EAD). However, it should be possible to extract a Dublin Core record from an NCD record for use with general resource discovery systems or, going in the other direction, to use an NCD record as the seed for a much richer collection description as and when time allows.

NCD is intended to cover any type of natural history collection, such as specimens, original artwork, archives, observations, library materials, datasets, photographs or mixed collections such as those that result from expeditions and voyages of discovery.

The charter and further information may be found at the NCD Website.

Latest Version and Related Files

NCD has reached version 0.9 and has been submitted (August 2008) to the TDWG approvals process through the Open Journal System. Once approved, it will be released as version 1.0

The latest normative files are in RDF and may be found in the TDWG resource directories:

http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/

The NCD files are Collection.rdf, CollectionType.rdf, Institution.rdf, InstitutionType.rdf and ContactDetails.rdf

Auxilliary files may be found as attachments at the foot of this page, including the second edition of the submission document, which incorporates corrections and additions requested by the Review Group.

Links to Discussion Topics

NCDListOfDeliverables

Work carried out from April 2nd to September 14th 2007

NCDWorkShops

The 2005 and 2006 workshops were held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

The 2007 Workshop was held at ETI in Amsterdam, 18th-19th June, 2007. The workshop reports for 2006, 2007 and other deliverables are available at the NCDWorkShops link.

No workshop took place in 2008.

NCD Public Review

The Public review phase of NCD is underway. All comments should be made at http://www.tdwg.org/stdtrack/article/view/312 (use "Add Comment" on the right hand side of the page). If you wish to refer to a document, please FIRST go to NCDPublicReview and use the Attach function at the bottom of the page to upload the file. Then add your comment to the OJS URL above with a link to NCDPublicReview.

Background Reading and Related Activities

• BioCASE Now completed EU FP5 project
• EAD 2002 Official site for the Encoded Archival Description
• DC:Collections Dublin Core Collection Description Community
• BiodiversityCollectionsIndex A global index of natural history collections.
• NCD Toolkit Cross-platform database developed by ETI in Amsterdam based on v0.8 of NCD

Auxilliary files

NCD-v090_TDWG.doc:	NCD v0.90 OJS submission - Second Edition following peer review stage
Collection.rdf	RDF for collection
CollectionType.rdf	RDF for collection type
Institution.rdf	RDF for institution
InstitutionType.rdf	RDF for institution type
ContactDetails.rdf	RDF for contact details
NCD-TDWG-2006.ppt	2006 presentation for TDWG