Should document abstracts in standards landing pages be abbreviated?

[baskaufs]

Because of the past conflation of standards and the documents that are part of them, the current landing pages do not distinctly differentiate between standards abstracts and documents abstracts.

In the cases of modern standards like DwC and AC where the standards documents are created and managed by TDWG, the landing pages really only need to contain the abstracts for the standards. The abstracts for the documents can be included in the documents themselves, which would be linked from the standard landing page.

However, for older standards that are published by organizations other than TDWG and for which TDWG does not maintain web pages, the information about the individual documents that are included in the standard would be best managed as abstracts on the standards landing page itself.

Currently, the build script simply uses the "abstract" column from the docs.csv documents metadata table to populate the abstracts section for the documents described on the standard landing page. Since the document abstracts are intended as stand-alone descriptions of the documents for machines that discover their metadata independently, they include a lot of redundant information that duplicates general information that probably should be included on the landing page in the standards abstract but not in the documents abstract. A good example of this is the tl-2 standard which contains 15 volumes whose abstracts are mostly redundant.

Perhaps there should be an additional column in the docs.csv table that contains a brief description of the particular document that could be used for the separate document descriptions. In that case, it might be better to call the current "Abstract" section something different, like "Description" since it wouldn't be a complete independent abstract of the document. Or maybe it would be better to just leave the full abstracts there.

[baskaufs]

I think this is OK now. For the standards with a lot of docs, they have acceptable stand-alone abstracts and if they are redundant on the standard landing page, so be it.