⚠️ Under Review

📣 Welcome to the Public Review of the Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) Standard

Thank you for participating in the review of the proposed Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) standard.
This folder includes documents that are intended to form part of the standard, as well as supporting resources to use, develop and maintain it. Placeholder: Notes for the Review Manager

🧭 How to Approach the Review

The BDQ standard is complex. There are requirements about which documents must exist and even what they should look like. Because of this the body of documentation can be complex to navigate. It will help to think of the standard as having two major, interconnected parts:

  • BDQ Tests:
    Practical Tests and associated guidance for assessing biodiversity data quality.

  • Fitness For Use Framework:
    The theoretical foundation that defines key concepts of data quality "Fitness For Use".

🚀 Choose Your Review Path

A. Introduction

First, read The Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) Standard page. This is the introduction and landing page for the standard (see section '2.2.1 Standards landing page' in the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification). Then, you can approach the remainder of the review either from the practical perspective (the Tests) or from the theoretical one (the Framework). The landing pages provide overviews of the subjects they cover and refer to more detailed information in associated documents. The details of the individual terms are provided in the corresponding term list documents. The controlled vocabulary term list documents also act as the landing pages for those vocabularies.

B. Documents emphasizing BDQ in Practice (the Tests)

Within the practical perspective there are two basic audiences, Users and Implementers, with fundamental interests in common. For either of these audiences, the BDQ Tests Quick Reference Guide is good continuation following the introductory The Biodiversity Data Quality (BDQ) Standard. The Quick Reference Guide is an informative go-to reference with only the essential information about the BDQ Tests. Also of common interest to Users and Implementers is the in-depth introduction to the Tests vocabulary - **BDQ Tests: Concepts and Use **. After all of this orientational material, there are guides specifically targeting Users and Implementers:

1. Users

2. Implementers

C. Documents emphasizing BDQ in Theory (the Framework):

The theoretical perspective is formally based on the Biodiversity Data Quality Fitness For Use Framework (Ontology). The following documents explain the ontology and how it is extended for use with the BDQ Tests and Assertions (the Tests):

D. Vocabularies

The Tests and the Framework are linked with each other via foundational vocabularies and controlled vocabularies of values. The terms in these vocabularies are formally defined in the List of terms documents, one for each vocabulary defined by the BDQ standard. IRIs in these documents follow the patterns in TDWG Standards Metadata. Following the guidance of the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification, the Fitness For Use Ontology has term definitions in a List of Terms document (below), and axioms providing additional ontology logic in a Vocabulary Extension document (above). We recommend reviewing these vocabularies carefully as well:

E. Supplementary

The standard is a result of a long history of development. The rationale for how the Tests and standard are defined, challenges encountered, and specifications for tests not included in the release of the standard are captured in the document

📥 How to Provide Feedback

To be determined.

Note that as a draft standard, this document includes the expected identifiers for entities that will only exist after the standard has been ratified and published on the TDWG infrastructure. In consequence, you will encounter broken links in the form 'https://rs.tdwg.org/bdqtest/terms/...', which will not work until the standard is published. The not yet working links are provided to indicate the expected form of the identifiers, and to provide a consistent format for the documentation.

🙏 We appreciate your contributions to ensuring the clarity, relevance, and usability of the BDQ Standard!